NJIT President Shares School's Impact on Newark and the State

As a part of our "Newark at a Crossroads" series, taped at NJIT, Steve Adubato talks to Dr. Joel Bloom, President of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, to discuss the school's academic, economic, and developmental impact on the city of Newark and the state of New Jersey.

9/26/16 #1902

Excerpt:

"Hi, I’m Steve Aduabato we are on the beautiful campus of NJIT, at the Wise Theatre? We're in the Wise Theatre? The Jim Wise Theatre. Yeah and we are pleased to kick off a round of great programming, once again with Dr. Joel Bloom President of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, how you doing, Mr. President? I am doing great, thank you. You haven't thrown us out yet. Well you pay your bills you leave at the 11 o'clock am hours, so yeah. Oh man, tell folks some of the really great things going on here at NJIT because it's a big part not just of the city of Newark but, of the state, and the region. Well, I think the beauty of NJIT, and our unique distinctively unique qualifications, we are the stem university of the state of New Jersey, we're it's polytechnic university and as you look around the state and the nation, the opportunities in science and technology, the research opportunities, the educational opportunities, and the economic development opportunities are massive. so we're riding a bit of a wave, a crest of the wave, when you can pick up popular magazines that are popular on news racks, and you see articles about stem stem careers, and all of the technology that's behind stem, we know the time has somewhat arrived. Science, technology engineering, and...? Mathematics. One really interesting thing is we came onto the campus here today, we've been taping here for several years and interviewing all sorts of fascinating folks in and around this community at NJIT, but the wellness center, which is, the technical name is? It's the WEC, the Wellness and Events Center. Scheduled to open in September of 2017 you begin to see some of the construction happening describe what it's gonna be. So it's 200,000 square feet and it, really, it's the genesis of one, we've outgrown the existing facility, the gym it opened when we had 4,000 students, today we are at about 11,500 students, so we need more space. the whole idea of wellness, and how you deal with wellness for your students, staff, and faculty I think, is very very important and then as we continue to grow our Newark college of engineering, our college of architecture and design and our Ying Wu College of computing sciences, those three are about the largest in the greater metropolitan area. that attracts people who want to come here for not only education, but training, professional meetings conferences, and right now on this campus, the largest facility we have, is 1,000 seats, in the event center that part of the wellness and events center, it'll open with seating for 4,500 people for professional meetings and conferences..."