Last Saturday night, the university hosted an event called TU Night, an open house of sorts for the community to visit the campus. Each department had a station displaying some of the research done currently being conducted. My department, the English linguistics department, had set up a game to test how “multilingual” players are – people who took part had to decide if a string of characters was a real word or a fake word in 10 different languages. We also had set up a poster for people to write the languages they knew – it turns out the people at TU Braunschweig know a lot of languages! (See picture above!)
I got the chance to walk around and see some of the other departments’ stands, which included a lot of technical science and engineering research. In a former life (a few years ago) I was going to be a science major, and I still really enjoy science, so I had a lot of fun walking around and seeing the cool projects at the university. (My favorite was a game called quantum mini-golf.)
Among the research displays and academic posters were lots of food stands and information about businesses in the community and a stage with live music playing the whole night. To me it felt more like a carnival than a university open house, and I thought it was a really good idea to get people in the community interested in the university.
After the stands had closed, the literature department hosted PowerPoint Karaoke, a funny impromptu presentation competition between a team of students and a team of professors – the students won. Then some friends and I walked around and ended up watching some of the live music on the outside stage.
Overall, I thought TU Night was a great way to connect not only the university to the community, but also the professors to the students. I think I read that approximately 20,000 people showed up, so I think TU Night was a success for all!
Tschüss,
Neil