Starting From Nothing
When I arrived at Washington University in St. Louis as a first-year student in 2016, there was no SHPE chapter. Dylan Zubata and I started one. We had no blueprint, no budget, and no idea whether anyone would show up.
By the time we graduated in 2020 with bachelor's degrees in systems science and engineering, that chapter had raised $40,000 across the four years I was involved, by directly contacting companies and lobbying Engineering Student Services — work that, as we later heard, was unprecedented in scope and speed for a new student org.
Why It Mattered Beyond Recruitment Numbers
The conventional wisdom is that you recruit students by marketing the program — rankings, career outcomes, research opportunities. That's table stakes. What actually moves the needle for underrepresented students is something different: seeing that there's a community for them.
"The school and university's admissions office and SHPE are engaging prospective Hispanic engineering students through communications and events, telling them 'this is our community.'" That's the message that changes the calculus for a first-generation student deciding whether to take the leap into engineering at a school where they don't yet see themselves reflected.
Representation at the student level is just as important as representation in the curriculum or on the faculty. We built something that said: there are people here who look like you and are succeeding. You belong here too.
The Results
The number of Hispanic students enrolled in McKelvey Engineering doubled between fall 2019 and fall 2020.
That's not a marketing success. That's what happens when you build an actual community and give prospective students a reason to believe they'll be supported once they arrive.
The Long Game: Alumni Networks
The piece that I thought about most — even as a student — was what came after graduation. Early-career Hispanic engineers often don't have the same informal networks that other graduates do. They don't have parents or relatives who went to the same school and work at the same companies. Those networks matter enormously for career advancement.
The vision was a SHPE alumni network where professionals who came through the program would mentor and advocate for the next generation of Hispanic engineers — making career advancement more accessible not just through skills, but through connections.
Building an organization is just the beginning. The durable value is in what it creates after the founders are gone.