Founded in 1993, the Society of Hispanic Professional engineers has been growing steadily and almost unnoticed on the WPI campus. SHPE-WPI is a society for any engineer at either the undergraduate or graduate levels. The purpose is to enhance students professionally by building the necessary skills to be a successful leader. The campus society maintains a constant contact with SHPE-nationals; which consists of over 3,000 students in hundreds of schools across the country.
Currently SHPE-WPI participates in tutoring programs with several local schools. Every Wednesday members tutor sixth graders at the Chandler Magnet school and that same afternoon they tutor highschoolers from the John Laws Institute in Salisbury labs. Earlier this year SHPE-WPI also sponsored a college orientation program for incoming freshmen. The society maintains four $500 scholarships that are given to the most active member, the member with the highest GPA, the most active executive board member and the member who most exemplifies SHPE-WPI. The scholarships are awarded during the end of the year banquet which will be held on May 3rd this year. Other community projects are planned for the following year. Among these is the possibility of wiring a local school with internet access with a government program called Net Day.
SHPE-WPI depends on cooperate donations, funding from the national chapter and on-campus fundraising to maintain active. Most of the money raised goes to paying for members to participate in three major leadership and career conferences across the country. The conferences are held by sponsoring schools in one of the major hotels in their area. They usually last 2-3 days and consist of several seminars ranging from leadership skills to time management. There is usually a career fair the last day of the conference; students who attend have the opportunity to hand out resumes and get interviews with companies ranging from General Motors to Kodak. This year the Eastern Technical Career Conference was canceled, but never the less SHPE-WPI was able to raise over $2,000 to send over 30 members to the National Technical Career Conference in Philadelphia and Regional Student Leadership Conference in New York city. The years biggest, the NTCC to which all the SHPE chapters across the country are invited is going to be held in Orlando Florida and preparations are already being made for as many SHPE-WPI members as possible to attend.
With its newly elected executive board making the transition to power, SHPE-WPI is full of new ideas. Hoping to double their membership, increase their funding and get involved in more community service will ensure this coming academic year to be challenging. But there is no doubt that SHPE-WPI has come a long way since Franchesca Escoto, Joshua Gonzales and Andrew Quirk, WPI seniors, founded it four years ago.