Section H8

Andrew Dilloian, Rick Hsu, Katherine Jackson, Zainab Jahangir, Grace Joo, Ishan Kalove, Tarun Krishnan, Ava Lepre, Daniel Mikhail, Ohm Patel, Sarah Ramos, Ananya Rayapuraju, Prerak Shah, Carlota Thomas-Serrano, Yash Yaragarla

Facilitator: Mary Jo Zachary

A Bird’s Eye View

2022
Marker on Posterboard, Website, 20×30 in.
Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program
Honors Colloquium Section H8

Our project is a poster depicting a map of Rutgers New Brunswick’s four campuses. Each campus is surrounded by images that represent the people and landmarks of the area. In addition to that, we deployed a survey in order to directly gather information about what people think of their campus and how they view a beloved community. We hope that this piece will serve to remind you of how our community is tied together and the different people you can find at Rutgers.

The QR code below will lead to a collection of our survey responses and images taken from each campus.

Our section decided to create a map of Rutgers campuses as a representation of Rutgers as a beloved community. First, we had a small group discussion about ideas we had for what the project could look like. Before we settled on a map for our project, we also considered creating a globe and filling it with sentiments from Rutgers students to represent our community. Eventually, we realized that a closer focus on Rutgers would be more effective. When we came together as a section and shared our ideas, we all concluded that a map would be the best representation. The map can help you get from campus to campus, connecting locations and making one able to go to other places instead of being restricted to one area and thus feel more involved in the community. Seeing the different campuses represented in one singular image, on our map, brings together many different places under one community. Through working on this project, we learned of the emphasis that Rutgers places on creating a Beloved Community, how to collaborate and work with others to reach a common goal as well as what people from different parts of Rutgers feel about the community as a whole.

We had some alternate ideas for our title that we tossed around during the inception stage. One frontrunner in our process was “rUtgerS.” This idea highlights the idea of community at Rutgers by emphasizing “US.” Then, we thought about how the map was like an overhead view of all of Rutgers, which led us to the idea of “A Bird’s Eye View,” which ended up being the title of our piece.