UCLA HKN Honor Society Receives Outstanding Chapter Award

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 given in recognition of the UCLA chapter’s resilient administration and adaptive programs during the challenging 2019-2020 academic year amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The IEEE society will formally present the award virtually at the HKN national commencement ceremony on June 5.

IEEE-HKN is an international honor society dedicated to recognizing and encouraging individual excellence in the field of electrical engineering. Founded in 1904, the organization has more than 250 chapters across the globe, with the Iota Gamma chapter of HKN established at UCLA in 1984. The Greek letters of its name, HKN, come from the Greek word ΗΛΕΚΤΡΟΝ, which is pronounced “electron,” and is the basis of the English words for electricity and electron.

IEEE-HKN is an international honor society dedicated to recognizing and encouraging individual excellence in the field of electrical engineering.

Nico Zani, the immediate past UCLA 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 electrical and computer engineering undergraduate community at UCLA has not gone unnoticed. The chapter accepts the top performing students from electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science and engineering majors at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.

Two of the main services that the HKN chapter provides for students are regular tutoring hours and mentorship events.  Chapter members tutor students from noon to 7 p.m. every weekday virtually over the community conversation app Discord. The student organization also coordinates events, including class-planning workshops, panels on applying to graduate school and informal group lunches between students and professors.

This school year, the chapter helped the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department present its annual fall career fair. The virtual event attracted 17 companies and more than 300 students and alumni in attendance — an increase from the previous year’s fair. Crucial to this effort was Gillian Vaughn, the chapter’s external vice president, who organized the event through online platform Brazen, reached out to companies and coordinated with UCLA’s ECE department to host the fair.