This Week at Rochester

Thursday, October 15 → Thursday, October 22, 2026
Lectures, music, sports, art, and campus oddities worth leaving your room for.

Updated October 16, 2026 · All times Eastern · Past weeks · Class-update excerpt

STAFF PICKS

Seven things we especially don't want you to miss.

Friday · Ideas worth building

The Heist: AI Hackathon Kickoff

2–4 PM · Schlegel 107. Teams build ideas at the intersection of AI, sustainability, MedTech and entrepreneurship.

Friday · Arts & ideas

Musical Wonderlands

5 PM · Humanities Center. Can a touch screen make music-making effortless, and what gets lost?

Saturday · Home sports

Three swimming matchups at noon

Canisius faces both Rochester squads, Siena faces the women; Speegle-Wilbraham Aquatics Center.

Monday · New music

OSSIA + Eastman Wind Orchestra

Two FREE 7:30 PM concerts, in Kilbourn and Kodak Hall respectively.

Tuesday · The wonderfully obsolete

Obsolete Press: analog printmaking

Noon pop-up and 5:30 PM archive conversation; zines, mimeographs and discarded technologies.

Wednesday · AI & energy

AI and the Reinvention of Energy

12:30 PM · Wegmans 1400. Accenture's global energy lead on an industry being remade.

Wednesday · AI & humanities

The Humanistic Epistemology of AI

5 PM · Humanities Center. Laurent Dubreuil interrogates the linguistic assumptions beneath LLMs.

Thursday, October 15

TALKS / LECTURES

Disrupting Politics

12:00–1:00 PM · Online

Katie Harbath and David Primo on technology, democracy and elections.

FREE · RSVP REQUIRED

ARTS

Fall Writer’s Lounge

5:00–7:00 PM · Humanities Center Lounge, Rush Rhees

Bring a piece of writing or simply drop by for conversation.

THEATER / DANCE

Big Love

8:00 PM · Smith Theatre, Sloan Performing Arts Center

Charles L. Mee's forceful reworking of ancient Greek myth.

TICKETED · $10–$20

Friday, October 16

OTHER CAMPUS EVENTS

Undergraduate Research Fair

1:30–3:30 PM · Feldman Ballroom, Douglass Commons

Meet faculty and research programs looking for student involvement.

TALKS / LECTURES

October CIRC Symposium

11:30 AM–1:00 PM · Wegmans Hall 1400

Center for Integrated Research Computing symposium.

TALKS / LECTURES

Who Votes in 2026 and Why?

12:30–3:30 PM · University events series

Public program on voting and election participation.

FREE

MUSIC

Emily Evans, voice

4:30 PM · Hatch Recital Hall

Eastman student recital.

FREE · LIVESTREAM

MUSIC

Kyle Boschen, tuba

6:30 PM · Hatch Recital Hall

Eastman degree recital.

FREE · LIVESTREAM

THEATER / DANCE

Big Love

8:00 PM · Smith Theatre, Sloan Performing Arts Center

Final weekend of this production.

TICKETED · $10–$20

Saturday, October 17

OTHER CAMPUS EVENTS

ISO Trip to Wickham Farms

1:00–5:00 PM · Wickham Farms · off campus

Student excursion organized by the International Services Office.

FREE

Sunday, October 18

MUSIC

Going for Baroque

1:30 PM / 3:00 PM · Memorial Art Gallery

Two short demonstrations on the museum’s historic Baroque organ.

FREE

MUSIC

Bach Cantatas

3:30 PM · Hatch Recital Hall

Free Eastman performance of Bach cantatas.

FREE · LIVESTREAM

Monday, October 19

MUSIC

Eastman Wind Orchestra

7:30 PM · Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre

Milhaud, Esmail, Grainger and Barnes; Mark Scatterday conducts.

FREE · LIVESTREAM

MUSIC

OSSIA New Music

7:30 PM · Kilbourn Hall

Student-driven new-music ensemble.

FREE · LIVESTREAM

Tuesday, October 20

MUSIC

Tuesday Pipes

12:10 PM · Christ Church

Weekly lunchtime organ concert.

FREE

OTHER CAMPUS EVENTS

Dogs and Donuts

4:00–5:00 PM · Feldman Ballroom, Douglass Commons

Therapy dogs, donuts and informal conversation about departments and courses.

TALKS / LECTURES

Artist in the Archive: Obsolete Press

5:30–7:30 PM · Rare Books & Special Collections, Rush Rhees

Rich Dana and Leisha Stanek on the forgotten technologies of DIY publishing.

FREE

Wednesday, October 21

TALKS / LECTURES

AI and the Reinvention of Energy

12:30–1:45 PM · Wegmans Hall 1400

Accenture global energy lead Vivek Chidambaram on AI and energy-sector transformation.

TALKS / LECTURES

The Humanistic Epistemology of AI

5:00–7:00 PM · Humanities Center Conference Room D

Cornell's Laurent Dubreuil explores how LLMs depend on theories of language and meaning.

MUSIC

Linda Boianova, piano

7:30 PM · Hatch Recital Hall

Eastman Faculty Artist Series.

TICKETED · LIVESTREAM

MUSIC

Eastman Wind Ensemble

7:30 PM · Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre

Eastman wind ensemble in concert.

FREE · LIVESTREAM

Thursday, October 22

TALKS / LECTURES

Sound, Voice, Incantation, Song

4:00 PM · Eastman Musicology Symposium

Alexandra Kieffer (Rice) on antiquity, sound studies and 20th-century music thinking.

Art you can catch throughout the week

ARTS

Desire and Abundance

Memorial Art Gallery · American still lifes and consumption, free to UR ID holders.

SOURCE HEALTH

  • Central University calendar HTML provided daily listings, but its public API and some page requests returned inaccessible/429 responses. The digest was assembled from daily calendar listings, group calendars and direct original event pages instead. Thus full API-pagination completeness cannot be certified.
  • Eastman’s own October calendar independently confirms the student recitals, RPO performances, Bach Cantatas, OSSIA, wind ensembles, jazz performances, and faculty series. The October 15 Liu Liu recital was rescheduled from October 13; one older Eastman page still shows the superseded date, so the new date is used.
  • Athletics official live-coverage and individual schedules agree on the home field-hockey game, three swimming matchups, road soccer, volleyball tri-match, cross-country, and Head of the Charles. Women's volleyball against Vassar is NEUTRAL at Ithaca, not a home game.
  • The River Campus Libraries feed surfaced a second event stream: Obsolete Press pop-up, archive conversation, and zine-making workshop. Repeat listings across the central calendar were deduplicated.
  • CCC / CampusGroups public service was inaccessible in this retrieval; specific organization-only listings may be missing. This is a documented coverage gap, not evidence there are no student events.
  • Simon/Ain Center yielded The Heist kickoff. The Wallis, Economics, Dance and Movement, Sloan, MAG, Humanities, Musicology and Goergen sources were separately checked where indexable; a quiet or stale page does not establish no events. Meliora Weekend is over, so archived event pages were not recycled.
  • Some entries link to a dated official organizer calendar rather than an individual event permalink when direct event pages could not be resolved. No unverified ticket prices or venues have been invented. Check source links for last-minute changes.
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