USU Engineering Students Reach out to Hispanic Community

The Student Life section of Utah State Today highlights work written by the talented student journalists at Utah State University. Each week, the editor selects a story that has been published in The Utah Statesman or the Hard News Café or both for inclusion in Utah State Today.

USU Engineering Students Reach out to Hispanic Community

By Katherine Lambert in The Utah Statesman Thursday, October 15, 2015

Two friends, sophomore Jorge Espinoza and junior Daniel Gomez, didn’t really know each other a year ago.

As two of the more than 2,600 students in the College of Engineering at Utah State University, the chances were slim that they would.

The chances slimmer still that they would become friends.

But Espinoza, a civil engineering major with a degree in law and constitutional studies and Gomez, a biological engineering major, now help each other trudge through 12 or more hours of homework a week. This is thanks to Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, or SHPE.

“With SHPE, the biggest thing for me is the fraternity with the members,” Espinoza said. “That bond that you make with some of the members that you stick with and will be friends with for life probably.”

And it’s this kind of fraternity that is helping Hispanic engineering students succeed at USU.

The number of Hispanic engineers increased from 5.5 percent in 2002 to 7 percent in 2010, according to a report “Engineering by the Numbers” by the American Society of Engineering Education.

“Right now is a really exciting time to be a Latino,” Espinoza said. “Right now, I feel like we’re on the verge. You’ve seen the elections, you know how immigration is really important. I feel like right now as a Latino it’s really important to help out our community just because of those things.”

But even with the increasing numbers, only 7.1 percent of the 2,305,215 engineers employed in 2011 were Hispanic, according to the “Disparities in STEM Employment by Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin” census conducted by the American Community Survey Reports. Hispanic engineers were third with 75.2 percent of engineers classified as White and 11.3 percent as Asian, according to the census.

This is despite the Hispanic population being the largest minority group and composing of 17 percent of the U.S. population, according to the “Facts for Features: Hispanic Heritage Month 2014: Sept. 15-Oct. 15” report by the U.S. Census Bureau.

That’s where SHPE comes in.

Throughout the year, SHPE members visit high schools, middle schools and sometimes elementary schools, giving presentations and encouraging students to seek after science, technology, engineering and math or STEM related careers, Gomez said.

The club also hosts activities that help get the community interested in engineering.

“We also have sessions were we go in and taught to them about scholarships and how to apply for college and things like that, because it can be really daunting,” Espinoza said. “Especially when your parents don’t speak English or they don’t know and you have to figure everything out on your own. Where the money is coming from. How to make payments, things like that so having the support from SHPE, it’s important for a lot of these kids.”

But the support does not end when students enter college. Graduated members of SHPE often help USU students, like mechanical engineering sophomore Adrian Meza, with their engineering pursuits.

“As a freshman, you don’t think you’re going to get internship opportunities that I’ve gotten,” Meza said. “It’s really opened doors for me, I was able to get an internship, a lot of our members were able to get internships through National Conference, through networking, through relationships within the club… It’s just benefits after benefits.”

This what Gomez called a “pipeline of knowledge.” Students can always reach out to more experienced SHPE members for mentors while also being mentors themselves, he said.

And some SHPE members at USU are even known for their influence in this pipeline.

Former SHPE president, Jose Campos, will receive a SHPE Technical Achievement Recognition award, or STAR award, for his work bringing others into STEM related fields at the SHPE National Conference Nov. 11-18.

And there is more than awards to look forward to at the upcoming conference. Thousands of SHPE members will gather in Baltimore this year for the conference, and so will representatives from companies all over the world.

“It’s amazing to see how important they think we are as a people,” Espinoza said. “You see all these really amazing companies telling you to come work with them.”

As members get a “taste” of what SHPE is about, they tend to stick with club, Meza said.

“We stress that we’re like a family,” he said. “And I think that we really are, because we all want to help each other out and we all want to see each other grow.”

— katie.l.lambert26@gmail.com or @klamb92