Humans of Rutgers University

"I’m deeply passionate about skating. It helps me destress from school, especially. When I have the time, I like to just go out, skate with some friends. (The) majority are also from Rutgers. The others have been people around the area, and we just have fun and just learn … We always fail a trick, but we keep going.

“School (has) always been my biggest struggle in life, which is why I’m actually graduating a year late. I feel like with the shift from the pandemic — my study habits have been just really irregular. It’s been hard to get back into the flow, even years after, but now I have to focus more.

“I guess this is something I’ll always just be working on. It’s all just a mental thing with time management and just having that drive to be determined to really understand the course.”

- Julie Vu, School of Engineering, Class of 2026

📸: Zoe Torralba

“The people I must give credit to for shaping who I am today are undoubtedly my debate coaches over the years. Debate has been an irreplaceable part of my teenage years. It has seen my ups, my downs and my averages, and my coaches were an irreplaceable part of that journey. They helped me understand what debate was, and they helped me find the motivation to keep pursuing debate after each and every failure. And outside of debate, they were friends. They were mentors that gave me nuggets of wisdoms and pieces of advice that I still hold dear to myself to this day."

“A passion of mine is, well, debate. What started off as an excuse to spend time with my crush became an activity I dedicated an unhealthy amount of time towards. Then the sport of critical thinking and arguing expanded my horizons from just arguing and doing debate to judging debate to teaching debate and to organizing massive debate events on the national and global scale.”

-Viet Phan, School of Arts and Sciences, Class of 2028

📸: Nathan Pham

“I'm a freshman in engineering — hopefully, biomedical engineering."

“Medicine is cool, but I don't want to go to medical school. I know you'll ask other biomedical engineers, and they'll say some variation of ‘I want to help people.’ We all know it's the real thing. They all think medicine is cool, but they don't want to go to med school. Or the really insane ones that do think medicine is cool and do want to go to med school — nod of respect to those people because I don't know how they do it."

“Like every other little girl in STEM, Marie Curie (has inspired me). She is the first woman to get a Nobel Prize, the first person to get two Nobel Prizes. And it's just with the women that came before me — Marie Curie, Susan B. Anthony — it's them who paved the way for me to be able to do what I want, which is to be an engineer.”

- Alice Shaikhutdinova, School of Engineering, Class of 2028

📸Anushka Dhariwal

“I actually found out about (the Rutgers Roundnet Club) my freshman year. So, that was four years ago, pretty much … back in 2021 … We saw just a group of people playing spike ball in our dorm area, and we’re like, ‘Oh, can we play?’ … And it didn’t actually become an actual club until sophomore year, the next year, because we didn’t file the paperwork.

“(Now) I’m the vice president of (the Rutgers Roundnet Club). So, I basically help run tournaments. I basically help oversee reservations with field areas and practice times — just generally managing things with the president.

“(I’ve been playing for) four years now, and for the first year, it was just with Rutgers. And in that year, I thought I was the best player ever. I was probably just a very bad player back then, but I had no one else to compare it to. And then I recently joined a group my second year playing. So, this is my sophomore year, and I found out how bad I was. I didn’t know how people actually played in competitive, and I got destroyed for years. And I’m still not one of the best people there. So, I just non-stop grind to the top, and I’m having so much fun. And I just found out about it through a GroupMe on Instagram. So, it’s fun to have that community.”

- Rubin Chang, School of Arts and Sciences, Class of 2025

📸: Lucas Tang