The annual Community Engagement Day held on 5 March 2025 included a very strong student element. One of these elements was a story reading by pupils from Ngelosi Primary School in Umlazi Township and by a pupil from Marian Ridge Primary School near Pinetown, in Durban. The highlight of the student participation was a reading by three MUT students who wrote essays. The winner was Nofezile Jali, a third-year Accounting student. Jali won a laptop. The other participants were Thembelihle Ngwana, a Nature Conservation student in the Faculty of Applied and Health Sciences, and Inan Ndayi, a first-year Construction Management and Quantity Surveying student. While reading her piece, Ndayi was overcome by the event and started to weep.