Photo Spotlights

The 2018 Finger Lakes Regional FIRST Robotics competition took place March 16-17 at RIT. More than 35 high school teams from across New York state, New Jersey and Canada participated in POWER UP, where students build robots and competed as if they are part of the inner workings of a video game. Winners from the regional move on to the national championships in April.

The 2018 Finger Lakes Regional FIRST Robotics competition took place March 16-17 at RIT. Groups from China, Brazil, Canada and the United States (shown here) performed their national anthems before the games began. More than 35 high school teams from across New York state, New Jersey and Canada participated in POWER UP, where students build robots and competed as if they are part of the inner workings of a video game. Winners from the regional move on to the national championships in April.

Computer Science Professor Paul Tymann works with students from Nicholas High School in Buffalo, N.Y. From left, Lucas Balbach, Jack Schlehr and Zach Carter work on a programming exercise in a computer lab. Sixty high school students from the Rochester-region competed in the first RIT High School Programming Contest March 12 at RIT’s B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. The teams of three worked to solve as many programming problems as they could in the least amount of time.

Brandon Hudson, a fourth-year student in the School for Individualized Studies, is CEO of Connexus, a heating and cooling company in Venture Creations that has developed a unique web-based thermostat system.

Certified therapy dogs visited at the Bow Wow Wellness event in Fireside Lounge March 8. The event was sponsored by the Center for Student Wellness as a stress reduction activity. Research indicates that pet therapy improves psychological well-being and self-esteem.

Celeste Kidd, left, one of the co-claimants in the University of Rochester sexual harassment case and named as one of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for her role as a silence breaker, and Lindsay Wrobel, a UR student who went on a hunger strike, spoke at RIT as part of International Women’s Day March 8. The event was sponsored by RIT’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program, the School of Communication, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Department of History.

The College of Liberal Arts Career Fair was hosted March 7 in the Gene Polisseni Center by RIT’s Career Services. Representatives from nearly 30 companies hoped to recruit full-time and co-op students with majors from the College of Liberal Arts and the School of Individualized Studies.

Jason Blythe, ’05 (MFA Computer Graphics Design) visits with MFA Visual Communication Design (VCD) students implementing their thesis along with Adam Smith, chair of the new media design program and graduate director of VCD on March 6. Blythe, the Google Shopping UX lead in Mountain View, Calif. is visiting RIT for a speech titled “Ignite Your Creative Spark” as part of the Eugene H. Fram Speaker Series. The speech is scheduled for 3 to 5 p.m. March 7 in the University Gallery inside Booth Hall.

Third-year computing and information technologies student Kian Hein, center, created a glass paperweight with some assistance from Jarryd Pezzillo, a fourth-year glass major. The event was a fundraiser for the 2018 Glass Art Society Conference in Murano, Italy. The two-day fundraiser offered instruction in making a paperweight in the hot shop or a glass pendant in the flame shop.

Left, Paula Register, a second-year computer science major from Nashville, Tenn. assists Jade Harris,16, to program a NXT robot in Golisano Hall. RIT’s Women in Technology, Women in Science, Women in Computing and Women in Engineering groups joined together March 3 to teach hundreds of young women about STEM, through hands-on demonstrations and activities.

From left, Mato Frankovic ’03 (hotel and resort management), mayor of Dubrovnik, Croatia, visited RIT’s Henrietta campus to learn about the region’s entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem. He was joined by Don Hudspeth (president and dean, RIT Croatia) and Marko Potrebica (president, Dubrovnik City Council). Elizabeth DeBartolo, director of multidisciplinary design for the Kate Gleason College of Engineering Multidisciplinary Senior Design, showed the group from Croatia several senior design projects. They also toured the Construct, the Simone Center for Research and Entrepreneurship and the AMPrint Center and met with senior leadership from RIT and the New York Wine & Culinary Center.

On February 28 and March 1, AdvanceRIT brought University of Michigan’s CRLT Players to the RIT campus for Cuts: Responding to Student Concerns, a two-session series that invited RIT faculty, staff and students to think together about the many forces that can shape campus climate, both positively and negatively. Built around a series of vignettes that explore students’ experiences of marginalization, each session offers a space where participants can practice engaging in difficult conversations about and across differences in identity while also reflecting on their personal responsibilities to cultivate inclusive and equitable spaces within and outside of the classroom.