Growing up in North Miami, Safiyah Muhammad was always at the beach and naturally drawn to marine life, which led her to consider marine biology as an undergraduate at Nova Southeastern University.

A world traveler, photographer and musician, Nick Pino’s dream is to live in the big city, but it was the human connections that drew him to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to earn his PhD in chemistry, and it is those same personal connections that he says make this department unique.

A few months ago, a new term cropped up on Twitter to describe an all-too-common phenomenon at academic institutions: a dude wall.