News

Kyle DeFord has become one of the stars of the HBO Max show STYLISH with Jenna Lyons. But it didn’t happen overnight. Graduating in 2008 in the middle of a recession, DeFord took a position at J. Crew at Eastview Mall. After several years working locally, he was hired as a recruiting coordinator in New York City, which became a pathway for the work he is doing today.

Intersections: The RIT Podcast, Ep. 43: The KEEN Engineering Unleashed network is driving change in engineering education. Patti Cyr, lecturer in the Kate Gleason College of Engineering, and Jennifer O’Neill, assistant professor in the College of Engineering Technology, discuss what the entrepreneurial mindset is and how connections to the network are providing an edge for RIT students.

After careful consideration, we have made the decision to move our alert level on campus from Orange to Yellow, meaning that the prevalence of the virus on campus remains a moderate risk. While this changes our alert level closer to where we all would like to be, we must continue to be extremely vigilant. We must not let our guard down.

More than a dozen RIT administrators and staff members have met regularly to discuss ways to help keep campus open as safely as possible as more is learned about COVID-19. To provide a student perspective, Griffin Warntz is serving on RIT’s Spring Planning Task Force.

RIT spent more than $8.2 million to make RIT’s campus as safe and clean as possible so that students, faculty, and staff could study and work confidently and comfortably. The university’s Infrastructure and Health Technologies Task Force implemented a variety of changes to RIT’s academic settings, housing, and dining designed to fight the spread of the coronavirus.

Analytical thinking, complex problem solving, creativity, resiliency, and flexibility are among the top skills needed for emerging careers by 2025. Anticipating these rapid changes in the workplace—further accelerated by lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic—RIT is seizing on the opportunity to guide students to “new economy majors” that are multi­disciplinary, transformative, and future-focused.

RIT had its best year ever for sponsored research funding. For fiscal year 2020, which ended June 30, RIT received 382 new awards totaling $82 million. The record funding follows almost $58 million in research expenditures in fiscal year 2019, also a record.

Students on co-op are picking up more than occupational and professional skills. As the pandemic unfolded last spring and summer, they saw firsthand how companies manage even in the midst of a crisis.

Our community took the virus seriously and was fully committed to doing whatever was necessary to stay safe. We were RIT ready and we’ll stay RIT ready moving forward.

RIT has announced an extension to a tuition scholarship program for RIT graduates seeking to further advance their career opportunities while the job market recalibrates and the country responds to the coronavirus pandemic.

RIT is offering an expanded version of Slack, the popular interactive software, with features to improve coursework and project collaborations. Slack Enterprise Grid, the comprehensive version, offers several upgrades.

RIT recently received a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop course modules that will provide students with guidelines and best practices in standards information toward helping organizations manage crisis situations.