For Kayla Yewon Park, A24 (BFA), a 3D animator and recent graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, waiting for a computer to catch up with her imagination used to be an exercise in patience. “Rendering just a 10-second segment of a 10-minute animation used to take anywhere from 24­ to 72 hours depending on the scene’s complexity,” she said.

Tallying public opinion as a war rages around you would seem next to impossible. But that’s exactly what pollster Khalil Shikaki, senior fellow at Brandeis’ Crown Center for Middle East Studies, is doing: surveying Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank during the Israel-Hamas war. Shikaki has dedicated his life to documenting Palestinian public opinion and sharing his objective empirical data with communities, policymakers, and academics. His most recent survey, the 91st opinion poll he’s conducted in Gaza and the West Bank, was arguably the most personal one of all. Illustration by Davide Bonazzi

Students in the newly revamped Journeyman Electrician program are experiencing more lightbulb moments in the classroom. The 18-month program meets the 600-hour educational requirements for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Journeyman Electrician License–preparing students to succeed in a role that has steadily grown in popularity and demand year after year...

An experimental partnership between student journalists and local media is helping to serve an industry in distress—and Gulls are thriving.

As a rising senior in high school, Kahina Haynes ’11 scored admission to a summer intensive with a prestigious dance company, an on-ramp program for aspiring ballerinas to leap into professional careers. Just as top high school athletes are scouted and recruited, summer intensives are opportunities to be discovered. She remembers, “I was the only Black dancer.”

Every year, Lorie takes joy in getting to know the Hamermesh Scholars–and she stays in touch even after they graduate. Twenty-Five SMFA students from the United States, South Africa, Turkey, and other countries have completed their degrees thanks to the scholarship–and gone on to launch remarkable practices and careers in the arts.

Thanks to the remarkable anonymous six-figure gift of a new kiln, the potential for what can be sculpted, thrown, glazed, or fired at SMFA is about to become boundless. The state-of-the-art computer-operated, large-scale kiln is being custom-built for SMFA in California and will be installed and ready for students in Fall 2024.

Senior Grace McMillan grew up in western New York state in an all-woman intergenerational home. In the 1980s, her grandmother and mother defected from the USSR and came to the United States as refugees. They were the only Ukrainian family in their semi-rural town...

Hofstra’s new academic programs are keeping the University at the forefront of higher education by promoting leading research, recruiting top students, and enhancing community engagement.

In high school, Emma Ciasullo, ’26 found tremendous meaning in working with children with autism. She imagined a future for herself in the classroom even before coming to Endicott. She chose the College because of its Educational Studies Program and the ability to minor in autism and applied behavior analysis. “School has always been a little harder for me,” Ciasullo said. “So, I talked to my advisor during the first semester. Together, we tried to plan the best course for me to stay on track...

Mendoza’s Powerful Means Program co-designs and opens an Early Childhood Development Center at St. Bakhita’s Vocational Training Center in Uganda

Wentworth undergraduates participate in research at every stage and level. "Engineering is a lot of fun for me," Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering John Voccio says before taking a sip from his large cup of Dunkin' cold brew. "I like to ask questions and then try to design experiments to solve those questions just like the old-school scientists." With a career spanning 35 years, primarily focusing on superconductivity and electromagnetics, Voccio's most recent research benefits from the work of some of the greatest scientists and inventors that came before him–including Michael Faraday and Benjamin Franklin. "I'm sure they were having fun, too," he says.

Growing up in the Boston suburbs, MIT senior Daisy Wang spent her spare time upside down underwater, dancing with her competitive artistic swimming team. “It feels like you and your teammates are one unit in the water, moving and working together, and there is an incredible amount of trust involved with all of the lifts and throws,” she said from her dorm room on campus.

The Tadler Center for the Humanities recently received an anonymous $250,000 gift, which is helping Charlotte Gordon, Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and Tadler Center Director, to bring luminaries like Stephanie Land to campus while fortifying a place for the arts at Endicott.

Last year, law student Dylan Van Sky (JD ’24) set torts and constitutional law aside to spend a week on the ground in West Virginia learning an entirely new set of skills and expanding his perspective. Van Sky was part of the 2022 Frontlines in America team supporting local partner Coalfield Development in launching a seed fund to help entrepreneurs scale up businesses with a social impact component.

Working in 30 countries and across the United States, Frontlines teams collaborate with local partners to imagine solutions for some of the world’s most challenging problems. To achieve this, Frontlines advisors donate approximately 400 hours of their time over any given semester. Acting as mentors and coaches, advisors provide solid business expertise and institutional memory about a project’s history and stakeholders, and emotional support to the team along the way.

From his home outside Chicago, the retired chairman and CEO of Lincoln Capital Management Co. said, “I believe that it’s better to give people help in a way that allows and encourages them to help themselves. At Frontlines, the support goes to spectacular organizations around the world. I watch the students give a tremendous amount of their time and energy. You couldn’t ask for a better combination and that’s why I’ve funded the program so aggressively.”

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Professor Misha Gekhtman was in Kyiv. His life changed forever for better and for worse. Gekhtman, professor of Mathematics at Notre Dame, never expected that Russia would invade Ukraine–or that fleeing for his life would also lead to falling in love, marrying, and gaining a daughter. When he tells the story–part tragedy, part romantic comedy–Misha admits, "If I read this as a screenplay, I would laugh because it's so unbelievable." Lifetime Movie or not, it's his reality...

When Noely Irineu Silva ’27, a student from Brazil, began selecting courses for her first semester at Wellesley, she focused on political science and sociology—fields she considered open-ended and creative. “Nothing involving math, please,” she remembers thinking, cringing as she charted her schedule. But a personalized invitation from two professors to join ECON 251: Wellesley Initiative for Scholars of Economics (WISE) offered an intriguing plot twist. Irineu Silva admits she enrolled in WISE to cross a graduation requirement off her to-do list. Yet as a result of having taken the course, she’s now set on majoring in economics and pursuing a career involving economics research...

Turning a problem upside down comes naturally to senior Amber Velez. She’d trained in trapeze and aerial circus arts for several years, but buying her own circular aerial hoop, called a lyra, was prohibitively expensive. Instead, as a sophomore, Velez decided to make an affordable lyra herself in a lab on campus...