Undergrads spending time at the university’s many global sites have been publishing their art and writing in student-run magazines that help to crystalize moments of transformation and exploration away from home. Hard copies of the NYU Berlin magazine Durch, for example, are distributed to all students and staff at the site. “We’re definitely losing the permanence of our media right now. Everything is subscription-based and streaming-based,” says one student editor of the decision to go print-only. 

Silver School professor Fred Ssewamala was raised as an orphan after losing his family to Uganda’s civil war in the 1980s. As a global health researcher, he has devoted 20 years of his career to developing support for children in remote villages, including the one where he grew up. The interventions are designed with one overarching goal: to improve the odds for youth who live with HIV and have lost one or both of their biological parents to the disease. 

Strip out the dramatic lighting, the fancy cameras, the craft food table, and are you still making a movie? NYU Los Angeles instructor Chris Cole, a filmmaker and former video producer at Apple, says yes. “There’s something so liberating when a filmmaker, at any level, goes back to the essentials,” Cole explains. And so he’s tasked his students with learning the fundamentals of filmmaking using only their smartphones. Relying on natural light and real Los Angeles locations, they are writing, directing, and editing three- to five-minute works with the little computers they carry with them everywhere.