I’ve blogged last year about starting a student organization at USC and the process and experiences that I had up until that point—finding co-founders,
organizing numerous proposals, identifying contacts and on-campus references, and much, much more. To give some context—in the spring semester of 2015, a few friends of mine and I got together and came up with a goal to start a co-educational professional engineering fraternity at USC. We had a number of choices from which we could choose but we ended up going with Theta Tau, the largest national professional engineering fraternity in the United States. It wasn’t a difficult decision given that in just the Southern California area there are chapters and colonies at UC Irvine, UCLA, University of San Diego, UC San Diego, and UC Riverside, there are brothers and alumni in all different professional positions in some of the most desirable companies and institutions, and the colors even align well with the USC Cardinal and Gold! Our current Alumni Advisor is a PhD student in the AME department from CU Boulder! From there we went through and continue to go through the process for getting recognition from the national fraternity as well as from USC and the Viterbi School of Engineering.
All the members of the fraternity were dispersed across the US and the globe doing interesting things throughout this past summer so it was difficult to get some logistical tasks completed during the summer, but we managed to organize everything for our initiation banquet on August 30, a few days after a number of us had just moved in. It was hectic but all in all a great experience—we got to meet a good amount of national representatives who had traveled from Texas, Arizona, and Alabama to initiate us, 30 or so members of local chapters and colonies had come to look over the initiation ceremony and congratulate our colonization, and we bonded as a group over a long and stressful week.
Rushees (and now pledges) problem solving during rush!
The next week was rush (the recruiting for Greek organizations) and we managed to pull together a great week of fun activities and ended up with an awesome 10-person pledge class who we are all very excited to welcome to our brotherhood and watch them grow!
Now that we have a great team of members we move forward with planning and executing on all our goals such as a bitcoin hackathon, a speaker series from interesting people from the LA tech scene, and even a low-cost software platform that subliminally demonstrates engineering design thinking concepts to younger children in a fun and simple way! It’s been a crazy ride so far but I’m so excited to see where this organization is going to go in the future! Stay tuned!
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