<p>There are only two at my university: Society of American Military Engineers/American Society of Civil Engineers and Theta Tau (fraternity). I'm not interested in either of those, in part because I'm not a CE major.</p>
<p>If anyone here is in any engineering clubs (some general organization or ME specific club), what is your club all about? How many members does it have? What does the organization do? How many leaders does it have? Basically, what goes on?</p>
<p>I'm asking because I thought it would be kind of cool to start my own organization one day, especially if there never ends up being one that I'm interested in, and as part of my research I'd like to know what sorts of things go on at other schools.</p>
<p>There are plenty of my school, albeit none of interest to me since clubs are inherently unproductive.
If you want to make your own, find others interested in doing so and go through the process of making it.</p>
<p>So I’m not sure if you’re referring to the professional societies or the more informal club type things, but I’m doing both so I’ll answer to the best of my ability. I’m a freshmen chemical engineering in AIChE and on the Chem-E car team.</p>
<p>AIChE - Definitely professionally focused. Most of the presentations are centered around planning a future in industry. Some of our meetings have included bringing in companies in our state to explain what they do and who they’re trying to recruit. We’ve also done resume workshops and things of that nature. We’ve done a few things for people looking at grad school, including a professor research night, a undergraduate research presentation night, and general advice from the older members and the professors. It’s definitely important to have helpful professors supervising these so that they can use their industry contacts and knowledge to provide a substantive experience. We have a President, VP, secretary, and treasurer, and they’re fairly well organized. We have about 30ish members, but of course attendance depends upon what you’re interested in and what you have going on.</p>
<p>Chem-E Car - A lot less formal. We have a supervising professor, but we only see him once every few weeks. Most of the time is just us undergrads designing the car (graphing the power output of the reaction, adjusting the stopping mechanism, etc.) Our goal is to design a shoe-box-sized car that will travel as close to 15 feet (or meters, I forget offhand) without going over the edge. You can use only chemical reactions. No mechanical devices can start or stop the car. There are some other rules, but that’s the gist of it. It’s a lot more fun because the students basically get to run and figure out the whole thing, as opposed to the professor’s basically telling us how it is. This of course means we lack some knowledge, and ultimately we have to get some help from professors to figure out what we’re doing, but it’s a lot more independent.</p>