News by Topic: Interdisciplinary Studies

Undergraduate students from packaging science, graphic design and industrial design worked over the semester to improve packaging and branding identity for Milwaukee Tools and its Shockwave power drill bits as part of the Packaging Systems class challenge.

As part of an interactive games and media course, 12 RIT students made cardboard and digital pinball machines designed around themes of their own choosing. For the final exam, students brought their creations to The Strong National Museum of Play and had visitors give their physical and virtual pinball machines a test drive.

Ridding waterways of microplastics, delivering water to remote villages experiencing drought, and better ways to remove salt from water were just a few of the clean-water research projects recently presented by undergraduate students as part of RIT’s Grand Challenge Scholars program.

A team from RIT and the Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía (IAR) upgraded two radio telescopes in Argentina that lay dormant for 15 years in order to study pulsars, rapidly rotating neutron stars with intense magnetic fields that emit notably in radio wavelengths. The project is outlined in a new paper published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Undergraduate students from RIT ROC-ed the Project during a local project management competition to increase awareness and volunteer services for Rochester’s M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence. Their solution, “The Common Source,” took top honors recently in the annual ROC the Project competition, a regional challenge for college students.

RIT is among the colleges and universities from 20 states that are participating in the Degrees When Due initiative, which aims to reach the nearly 4 million near-completers and uncredentialled completers in the United States who stopped college for financial reasons, family obligations or a variety of other reasons. By joining the initiative, RIT will learn best practices in degree reclamation and provide targeted support while re-engaging students who have paused, or “stopped out,” their studies.

Claudia Alant, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student from Niskayuna, N.Y., has worked for the Writing Commons for five semesters. According to Alant, being a peer consultant for the commons is “one of the coolest jobs an undergraduate student can have” on campus.

A college student’s first year on campus can be adventurous, exhilarating, challenging, academic, rewarding and even a bit scary. To help make that transition into higher education a bit easier, RIT has started an innovative program to help students discover how they can be active on campus and engage with new people and places.

Intersections: The RIT Podcast, Ep. 28: Since 2010, Metaproject has paired RIT student designers with a client in what has become a signature project for the university’s internationally-ranked industrial design program. Distinguished professor Josh Owen, director of RIT’s industrial design program and founder of Metaproject, talks with distinguished professor Roger Remington, director of the Vignelli Center for Design Studies, about a decade of connecting students to industry.

A town hall meeting tonight will explore graduate student life and issues facing master’s and Ph.D. students at RIT. The “What’s Up?” forum will be held from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Dec. 5 in Institute Hall.

Meet Gap Year Fellow Amanda Zaremski, CEO of WinutRx, a patient-centric medical tool for mobile devices used to personalize nutrition and medication tracking for people diagnosed with cardiovascular disease.

Meet Gap Year Fellow Sam Cammarata, co-founder and co-owner of Aesthetician Labs, an artist-owned video game collective which focuses on producing games that are “aesthetic, juicy, and satisfying to play.”