Wentworth News Archive

Top-heavy buildings typically incorporate many walls to help support the weight. Jacob Lehrer went in a different direction when designing a library.

Asked to conceptualize a structure featuring round columns for Professor Ines Benitez’s Architecture Studio 2 class, Lehrer remembers thinking, “Why not play it up?”

He implemented one-foot concrete columns among few walls on the first floor to give the building the dramatic appearance of heavier upper levels that are barely supported underneath.

Simmons University and Wentworth Institute of Technology will jointly host a virtual “Digitizing Women’s History: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon” event from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesday, March 31.

Wentworth has been named to the list of “50 Best Online Colleges for Return on Investment” by Online Schools Report, a resource site that considers student satisfaction, admission rate, online presence, department size and median debt by program.

The university earned the number 10 spot on the list. Wentworth’s top 2% ranking among U.S. schools for value added earnings and its high occupational earning power were cited by the group.

While much of the world shifts to distance and online modalities of education due to the Coronavirus outbreak, Wentworth officials have experience on which to build.

Six degree programs and one certificate program are fully available remotely right now and more programs are in the works for later in 2020 and 2021.

Wentworth President Mark Thompson was among area university officials who spoke to Boston Business Journal in their “Arts, engineering colleges face extra hurdles moving classes online” article. He speaks of the laudable way that staff and faculty have quickly adapted to a new landscape given an outbreak of Coronavirus.

Maarouf Barry is a student living anything but the typical college lifestyle. Not only is he active at Wentworth, he also runs his own start-up in his home country in Guinea that focuses on an industry integral to African cuisine: palm oil.

“Palm oil is the main crop that we grow, and palm oil in Africa is like olive oil in Italy. It’s our main cooking oil that we use, and a vital ingredient in most of our cuisine,” says Barry, BSM ’20.

Though many events around the world have been officially cancelled in recent weeks, Wentworth’s March Career Fair is not one of them. The fair will go on as a virtual experience.

On Tuesday, March 31, the online fair will take place on WITworks from 3-6 PM. Students are invited to upload their resume to the site and research participating employers. Employers will communicate directly with students on the day of the fair and answer submitted questions.

For their alternative spring break this year, a group of 11 students looked to alternative energy.

Eschewing a traditional spring break spent on the beach or other vacation spots, Wentworth students partaking in the yearly ritual known as ASB choose to complete community work, often assisting food pantries, local schools and other non-profit organizations. This week, the group headed to San Francisco to help install solar panels with GRID Alternatives.

Wen Stephenson, author of What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other:  Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice, will speak in Blount Auditorium on Wentworth’s campus on Tuesday, March 17 at 6:00 p.m.

Stephenson, a former editor at the Boston Globe and the Atlantic, and currently a contributing writer for the Nation, will share his story of climate activism and how individual citizens can insist upon change.

UPDATE: Using a pair of goals in the third period, the top-seeded and 12th ranked Endicott College men's ice hockey team edged Wentworth Institute of Technology, 2-0, in the championship game of the 2020 Commonwealth Coast Conference Tournament.

Find a full recap of the game at the Wentworth Athletics website. 

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Wentworth has created a website to keep the community informed about the university’s efforts around the coronavirus outbreak. This is the central resource to access important information from health agencies and stay current with any and all potential developments on campus.

Author and Vietnam War veteran Joseph Allen Freeborn spoke to Wentworth students and others in Watson Auditorium on Feb. 25, sharing awe-inspiring tales from his new book, Letters from Vietnam.

Freeborn served in Vietnam from August 3, 1971 through March 16, 1972, stationed in Da Nang where the U.S. Air Force housed a major air base. He told Wentworth students about arriving in a foreign land, his ruck sack that weighed nearly 86 pounds, and about how he would have to build his bedding most nights. Other nights, he had nothing more than a poncho on the ground.

The Braintree-based Flatley Foundation is giving $1.75 million to Wentworth to create an endowed scholarship fund for local students who want to major in life sciences at the university.

Wentworth’s Architecture programs fared well on a new list of best architecture schools compiled by rankings group GradReports:

Simmons University and Wentworth Institute of Technology will mark the 100^th anniversary of women’s suffrage with a “Transcription Party: Making Women’s Historical Papers Accessible” event on Tuesday, February 25.

The year 2020 marks the 100^th anniversary of the 19^th Amendment, which prohibited voter discrimination based on sex.

Fourth-year architecture students stepped outside the comfort of their traditional studio setting to examine problems that engage wide-ranging communities in Boston and Venezuela. The projects—each linked to one of three academic concentration areas—explored problems faced by urban communities, with the intent to find design solutions in support of equity and civic life.

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Emily Levy, CEO and co-founder of wellness wear company Mighty Well, will be the keynote speaker for the 14th annual Women@Wentworth event on March 27.

Levy is an award-winning social impact entrepreneur and patient advocate. Her company creates innovative medical wearables and focuses on apparel inclusivity for those living with chronic illness and disability. She was an executive in residence in Wentworth’s Accelerate program.

Concrete makes up many things that we use in our day-to-day lives. Streets, sidewalks, buildings… and canoes?

Held every April, the concrete canoe competition pits schools against each other in a boat race, but as the name denotes, this is not your average race. Students in the Wentworth chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers calculate the proper materials and numbers that they will need to create a mold before pouring the canoe.

Allison Lange, assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, presented “Images and the Fight for Women’s Voting Rights in the United States” to students at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Penn. on Jan. 23.

The visit kicked off Muhlenberg’s history lecture series, “A Century of Struggle: Women’s Rights Before and After Suffrage.”