Surprise spring snow doesn’t deter crowds at Imagine RIT

There's always something new to experience at the Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival, which this year featured more than 400 exhibits, including a human hamster wheel, performances by student ensembles, cutting-edge video games and demonstrations to determine how color can affect your mood.

Wind-blown showers greeted morning visitors to the annual festival, but didn't seem to hamper attendance as dedicated visitors carried their complementary orange RIT tote bags and began exploring.

“It feels exhilarating,” said Mahmoud Hamdy, a mechanical engineering student from RIT Dubai. “This is my first time traveling outside of the Middle East and I'm seeing snow for the first time in my whole life!”

It was also the first time students from RIT Dubai presented an exhibit at Imagine RIT. Hamdy and three other students showed their capsule made of titanium and carbon that can be placed inside a small CubeSat satellite to conduct experiments to determine how plant roots grow in space.

The students, who made the exhibit for their senior design project, received funding from the RIT Global Scholars program and relished the opportunity to see the Rochester campus and display their research alongside their peers from the U.S. While here, the students hope to connect with some of the clubs from the main campus like RIT SPEX for future collaboration and want to lay foundation for more students from RIT Dubai to travel to Rochester.

“We want the freshmen to have the same opportunity that we have right now,” said Hamdy. “We're pushing them to apply for the RIT Global Scholars program and to work on interesting projects that they can come to RIT and present.”

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