On Monday, we had our first general body meeting of the year. Wait, first? What? It’s November. The first semester is almost over. Hello? What’s going on?
Welllll… the UMD Branch of IEEE has been completely inactive since around 2021. Why? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It seemed to just fizzle out when people stopped having meetings, with the last known meeting being September of 2021. At the start of this semester, the current executive board began the process of reviving the former IEEE and bringing back all the things that we used to do while also hoping to bring some fresh new ideas to the table. It took until this point in the semester to get all of our operations in order, and there’s still a lot left to bring back. This meeting was essentially just an overview of everything we hope to do in the future, what we stand for, and our general vision for the future of the club. Feel free to skim through this email, and if things here interest you then do try to get involved, attend future meetings, suggest your own ideas, whatever.
First, what is IEEE?
Well, we have an official mission statement:
To empower both ECE undergrad and grad students to achieve more professionally, socially, and academically as they journey through UMD.
And yeah, this is true, but really our main goal is one thing: to increase engagement within the ECE department (with a focus on Electrical). Whether it’s professional, academic, or social (especially social), we want to get members of the ECE community from all ages and backgrounds together and engaging with each other.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
No, we don’t just say these things because the University makes us. Electrical and Computer engineering has some of the lowest representation of women and minorities of all majors, even within engineering. It doesn’t take any big brain engineer to figure out that part of this is because the environment in the field has not been very welcoming of these groups for a very long time, and still remains a hostile environment to women and minority groups. We want to help fix this, so we want to create a welcoming and inclusive environment to everyone here in IEEE. If talking about diversity and inclusion doesn’t go well with you, we encourage you to leave and not come back. We are taking a hard line stance on racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism and pretty much any other belief of prejudice. We will not tolerate intolerance.
IEEE is a professional organization is it not? Don’t we have to pay dues?
Good question! While we are affiliated with the official IEEE Student Branch of UMD, you do not have to pay dues or be an official member of the International IEEE organization to be in the club or attend events. You don’t even need to be in ECE, we are open to all majors!
If I don’t need to be in IEEE to be in the club, why should I even pay dues?
Being a dues paying member of IEEE (the student rate is $32 per year), you get access to the IEEE Spectrum (the magazine edited by IEEE that has all the latest electronics industry news), the IEEE Xplore Database (research database with thousands of articles on the world’s most advanced sciences and technology), IEEE scholarship opportunities, you can go to IEEE conferences (notable one is Region 2 Student Activities Conference), and any of the chairs are invited to the IEEE Washington Section AdCom meetings.
Soooo, what’s the deal with the club part? What do we do as a club that’s different from the professional society? Firstly, events!!!
As an academically and professionally oriented organization, we do a lot of events in that area like Technical Talks with members of the industry, alumni, or professors. We’ve done panels about student internships from those who currently hold or have held internships, we’ve done resume workshops and have started to build an ECE resume database. We also help out with the Alumni Cup, which is the engineering department’s Rube Goldberg machine competition held every year between the departments. In the future, we’d like to collaborate with Terrapin Works to hold workshops for ECE skills like arduino, soldering, and PCB manufacturing.
Yeah we’re “academic and professional” (as Liam would say, “mimimimi”) and all that but we really do love our social events. We’re big on building up the ECE community, so we do fun events with both students and faculty. Famously, in the past we did happy hour at Looney’s Pub with staff/faculty in the department, and those used to be a big success. The first picture on the ECE department student activities webpage is of an ECE happy hour in 2014, and we used to have good attendance with these events both from students and professors/faculty. Reading day breakfast events, game nights, movie nights, end of year sendoff parties for the seniors, all of these are fun events that we have held in the past and look forward to holding in the future (especially in collaboration with other student orgs like SWE, WIE, BES, SHPE, ASME, ASCE, AIAA, etc)!
What’s the deal with projects?
While many other clubs on campus offer students engineering experience on general design projects, only at IEEE do those projects have electronics and ECE concepts take the foreground as opposed to being just a small part. IEEE offers a home for specifically ECE projects, as well as dedicated funding and a supportive primarily ECE community. Essentially, anyone in IEEE interested in starting some sort of computer/electrical engineering-oriented project is more than welcome to pitch their idea to us (via email). Leaders of official IEEE projects become project chairs, who are members of the executive board, and work with the treasurer to obtain funding and demonstrate their project at recruitment events like Maryland Day. There is no set number of participants required to start a project, and it is absolutely encouraged to recruit people for your project! There are many unfinished and slightly questionable projects from years past, many of which unfortunately have little to no information about previous workings. That said, the materials for three projects still exist in the IEEE lounge and are available for anyone to take over and try to revive: a Safe Cracking device to open the safe in the IEEE lounge, a programmable LED cube, and the Server (we don’t know what it does).
Other cool stuff:
- We’re looking to do IEEE tutoring
- We have a test bank with past exams from a variety of courses (MATH, CHEM, ENEE, PHYS, etc.) that is entirely built and maintained by us!
- We have an IEEE lounge! It is located in EGR 0104 (next to the Kirwan food court), and you can gain swipe access by either attending 2 events or submitting a unique test to the test bank (the test must not already be in the testbank). After you’ve done either of these, you can submit a request for swipe access and we will grant access in batches every month.
- We’re looking to do a lot of fundraising events. These can fund any of our events, travel to conferences in other states, and to help pay member dues.
- We want to attend recruitment events like the First/Second look fair, the Engineering Clubs Fair, and hopefully have some IEEE projects to showcase at our tables. We would also like to have a table at Maryland Day to show any of our projects.
Okay, so that was a lot of information about stuff we would like to do, but what are we actually doing? Well, we are working on all this stuff, but there still very much is room for you all to get involved. We still need an Academic Chair and Fundraising Chair, as well as Project Chairs for projects that we don’t even know what the content is yet. If you have ideas about what we should do here at IEEE, ideas about the directions we should go, or just generally want to help out the executive board, reach out to us at ieee.umd@gmail.com (or text any member of the executive board on groupme).
We look forward to an amazing rest of the year for IEEE, and hope that in the future we can build IEEE back to what it once was and even reach new heights for the club.