HKN Honor Society Receives Outstanding Chapter Award

This month, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) honor society awarded UCLA’s HKN chapter an Outstanding Chapter Award for the 16th year in a row. The award was for the work UCLA’s chapter completed during the 2019-2020 academic year.

IEEE-HKN is an international honor society dedicated to recognizing and encouraging individual excellence in the field of electrical engineering. The honor society was founded in 1904 and has over 250 chapters. The Greek letters of its name, HKN, come from the Greek word ΗΛΕΚΤΡΟΝ, which is pronounced “elektron”, and is the basis for the English words for electricity and electron.

The Iota Gamma chapter of HKN was established at UCLA in 1984. In their announcement of the 26 chapters that were given the award, the IEEE-HKN Board of Governors stated that the award was for recognizing excellence in chapter administration and programs.

Nico Zani, this year’s chapter President, said that he is humbled by the chapter’s success, and glad that the chapter’s hard work to provide services to the entire ECE undergraduate community at UCLA has not gone unnoticed. The chapter accepts the top performing students from electrical engineering (EE), computer engineering (CE), and computer science and engineering (CSE) majors.

Two of the main services that Iota Gamma provides for students are regular tutoring hours and mentorship events. Chapter members tutor students from 12 pm to 7 pm every weekday virtually over Discord. Some of the events that they coordinate are class planning workshops, panels with graduate students on applying to graduate school, and informal group lunches between students and professors.

This school year, the chapter helped the ECE Department present this year’s annual fall career fair. This event brought companies to campus for students and alumni to network with. There were 17 companies and over 300 students and alumni in attendance, which was an increase from the previous year’s fair. Especially crucial to this effort was Gillian Vaughn, the chapter’s External Vice President, who organized the event through Brazen (online career fair platform), reached out to companies, and coordinated with UCLA’s ECE department to host the fair.