Why Should I Go Looking in IRis?

If I was applying to go to college, and was hearing over and over about how important research is at major universities, I might wonder what exactly that means. Research can be something of an abstraction to a high school student—most of the social and lab science taught in classes is done straight out of textbooks, two or three times removed from the original research that they’re based on. Northeastern has great opportunities for grad and undergrad students to be involved in research, with faculty and independently. IRis contains research done here at NU, and can show a prospective student both what she or he could be working on, and the kinds of research that are being done on campus that make NU unique. For example, I’ve gone through just now and seen a capstone project in mechanical engineering about turning tires into fuel. This seems like a really interesting project: the method is laid out for breaking down old tires, pulverising them into particles, and the economic model for generating fuel this way. IRis is free and open to the public, and is therefore a great way for the university to show off to prospective students. It can also be appealing to new students to see how their work could be published and permanently archived.