UTA IEEE
I am not running just for a title. I have ambition for this club. I seek to transform IEEE at UTA into an organization that accomplishes tangible, technically-challenging things, provides immense value to its members through knowledge and community, and breeds strong Maverick Engineers ready to trailblaze any endeavor.
What is the IEEE club now? What do we accomplish? What keeps us from accomplishing more? These are the questions I ask myself. We must confront honestly what this university IEEE chapter is becoming: a loose organization of dozens of on-and-off-again members who perhaps attend a few general body meetings or networking events, but ultimately forget about the club and move on to more engaging organizations. IEEE becomes a static line item on their resume listed only as a couple lines of window dressing until something less vague replaces it.
We are a professional organization, not a design team— but how do you run a professional organization as a person who is yet to be a professional? It is a needlessly vague identity and we can do better as engineers.
What is IEEE in the real world? Trillions upon trillions of electrical components are manufactured each year. Every waking moment of your life relies on at least one but likely many dozens of these devices functioning in tandem like perfect electron clockwork.
Billions live because humanity has compiled two centuries worth of knowledge into tomes that guarantee not only our health, homes and food, but also allow us to accomplish incredible things like sending rockets to orbit or fusing atoms with lasers. This is because IEEE—cumulatively producing ~30% of the world’s literature on electrical engineering—has dedicated professionals pumping out thousands of journals, papers, and standards every year. IEEE is not a design team, nor a ‘networking’ club.
IEEE is infrastructure.
My goal as an elected official of the UTA IEEE chapter is to replicate the immense benefits provided by our namesake. I seek to re-vitalize the club into becoming a core of infrastructure for all engineering students at UTA.
I spent a lot of time thinking of not just nice words, but concrete initiatives we could begin creating as a club to make this happen. I have come to some suggestions by taking the perspectives of people with credibility: real industry engineers working on the next moon landing, PhD students at MIT, and professionals working at the bleeding edge of interdisciplinary science.
This is my plan, structured by initiatives.
IEEE will make its primary weekly event a topical seminar/workshop. Each active member shall be expected to host a 10–15 minute seminar with slides and a question segment at least once a semester. Members who don’t meet this criteria are considered inactive.
IEEE is fundamentally about storing and disseminating knowledge as we map the frontiers of electrical engineering. This requires consistent communication and dedicated members organizing the exchange of knowledge. Currently one of the biggest afflictions of our club is the fact that members come and go like sand through fingers. How can an organization be ran when you don’t know who will or won’t come to the weekly meeting? The better question is what is incentivizing them to stay?
This is why I plan to implement weekly-cadence micro-seminars in which every active member of the organization is expected to participate. The consistent varied events keep members active and returning to the club. It gives them a reason to think about IEEE each week, and it also allows members to invite their interested friends or colleagues to events.
My belief is that we are all in this profession at least partially out of passion for the beauty of science and engineering, and thus we all have interesting perspectives and valuable experience worth sharing. 10–15 minutes, the length of a YouTube video is all it takes, with accompanying slides.
At least once a semester, every member intent on staying active in the club must exercise their soft skills and present an electrical-engineering adjacent topic to IEEE members and any other audience members. These talks can be about anything informative!
We all learn at least one new thing a semester, this shouldn’t be hard. Further, it allows those who really seek to be a part of the organization to show off their chops and a side of their interests to peers. But with carrot comes stick, we must be diligent about catering club resources to those who actually want to be involved in the club, not those who are perpetually on the fence or flaking out. Giving a seminar is a display of commitment, and members who do not deliver are more than welcome to hangout and listen-- but ultimately not going to be beneficiaries of the club in its other endeavours.
This is step one of how we begin capturing steady members and become a real organization.
The IEEE Organization will start and maintain a public technical wiki for all students as its primary project. Members will be expected to contribute technical reports, blogs, and project documentation to the wiki.
Ok, we got membership, woohoo! Now what? Well I hate to give more homework but writing things down is the only reason humans ever got to leave the caves. As an organization focused on the infrastructure of knowledge, we should strive not only to orally present that knowledge to peers but to write it down for posterity.
The “MavLog” will be our internal Wikipedia where year-round we are contributing:
Further, writing is thinking. Even writing out the step-by-step process of how you solved a particularly hard problem from Signals and Systems can be valuable knowledge that the writer themselves benefits from by hard-coding the knowledge into words.
Here are some examples of technical writings that particularly inspire me:
The IEEE Organization will seek to expand its outreach to other organizations with a primary focus on UTA design teams and industry connections. Further, we will start a journalistic initiative with design teams to capture their knowledge.
This will serve in conjunction with the MavLog, but the idea is that as the IEEE team we should help all of our fellow engineers building cars and rockets to preserve their hard-earned ‘tribal knowledge’. What is ‘tribal knowledge’? It is a term professional engineers use to describe all the non-formal knowledge they need to run their industries gained only by hands-on experience. It is the proverbial ‘dark matter’ of all engineering knowledge— never found in a textbook but accounts for 90% of all the important facts about how to make the world run.
Every year the seasoned veteran seniors of the Formula car team or UTA Rover team go on to bigger and better ventures while a cohort of freshman who can barely tie their shoes rolls in barely understanding that V = IR. Every year we have to claw back the lessons learned because the people building the machines are often too busy to write it down!
IEEE should start an initiative to help design teams capture and integrate their knowledge into MavLog. This can be:
Newton stood on the shoulders of giants but if we all had to start from scratch re-deriving Newton’s Laws, we would still be dropping apples from trees instead of carving 1-nm transistors with beams of light.
Sustained and substantial membership will give the club the ability to realistically branch out into organizing real engineering events like competitions, hackathons, and hardware projects.
This is where we want to be, as an IEEE chapter, but first we need the solid foundation to get there. Once initiatives 1–3 gain momentum, it is plausible that we can unlock the ability to coordinate the things we as members have dreamed about for years such as funding students to attend conferences, professional events, or competitions. But this starts with producing deliverables of value and being a consistent, continuous organization first.
Overall, I am optimistic for a vision of what this club has the potential to be. Even if I do not win your vote, I hope whoever holds the club’s future will consider these ideas nonetheless.