Two years ago, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous congratulated the Class of 2009 at Morgan State University’s 133rd Commencement, saying, “You will forever carry the badge of honor as the generation that changed the world before it graduated.” More recent events are proving that Generation Y at Morgan is still upholding the banner of positive change. A new organization on campus is harnessing the brainpower, idealism and fearlessness of members from many academic disciplines to come up with innovations to enhance the campus and the world.
It all started with a can of pomegranate soda. Timothy Akers, Ph.D., Morgan’s interim associate dean for graduate studies research, explains that he was looking for students to help create some new ideas using funding from a U.S. Department of Homeland Security grant the University had received in 2008. Last January, he brought a talented biology major named Vladimir Celestin into his office in the Dixon Science Research Center to talk about ways to get MSU students to “explode their thinking.”
As the two brainstormed, Celestin eyed the can of pomegranate water that Dr. Akers was about to finish off.
“May I have that can, Doc?” he asked. “I really believe in recycling.”
But once he had the object in hand, where would Celestin take it? As he explained to Dr. Akers, “There was a lack of emphasis on recycling here on our campus, and there was a lack of notification about where to go to recycle and how to do it correctly.” “That triggered an idea,” Dr. Akers recalls. “I asked him, ‘How are you about working with apps for cell phones and things like that?’ ” The solution that came out of their meeting was to organize a group of MSU students to create a mobile phone application that would send alerts to the users’ phones when they were in the proximity of recycling units on campus. The high-tech solution would also require the development of special transceivers to transmit signals from the recycling units and receive signals back from the cell phones.
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