One of the challenges of teaching online is how to create meaningful hands-on experiences, but this fall University of Michigan engineering students will build their own pulse oximeters, control a robotic arm, and install a radio antenna to collect data for a NASA mission to understand the sun’s most violent space weather eruptions.

Forty University of Michigan College of Pharmacy 4th-year students recently completed the COVID Emergency Response rotation – the second group to go through the inventive and relevant nontraditional Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience (APPE).

For Sabrina Corsetti, the pandemic presents an interesting problem—a data problem, that is. Her efforts to model the pandemic’s spread using a machine learning algorithm has now been included in those being aggregated for the CDC’s weekly projections.

Growing up in Maryland, Julie Hui remembers that when she wanted an internship experience, she hopped on the computer and “cold emailed” the people who could make it happen. And it worked.

Ford School of Public Policy’s Integrated Policy Exercise (IPE) is a mosaic of moving parts: for the two-day event, 170 master’s students role-play different constituencies of a notable policy issue in a real-time simulation of a negotiation process. Each student needs to be engaged at all times, and the event needs to adapt as students interact with the simulation and different scenarios play out.

Student group projects can sometimes conjure memories of unequal work distribution, domineering group leaders and times where one student is left frantically overhauling another member’s careless work, moments before a deadline.

Instead of spending their summer at remote research stations, University of Michigan students have been conducting field research at home. Using smartphones and machine learning platforms, students have also connected to a global network of scientists.

Throughout their time on campus, students learn through not just academics — but through all aspects of their experience. Many times, however, they do not recognize these moments for growth and for developing skill sets that will greatly aid them in the future. Leaders at U-M Dearborn recognized this issue — and filled that need.

Blueprints for Pangaea, a student-run 501(c)(3) medical surplus recovery organization (MSRO), coordinated a donation of around 700 plastic face shields to Packard Health, Hope Clinic, Jewish Family Services of Washtenaw County, and SafeHouse Center, thanks to a generous donation of PPE from Crawford Industries and Systematics, Inc.