Check the calendar or GroupMe to find out!
Students of all majors, ages, and genders are welcome to participate in our organization and there is no membership fee. We encourage members to become national members, which does have a membership fee. If you are nervous to come to your first meeting by yourself, please feel free to bring anyone to the meeting with you. If you are a parent, please feel free to bring your child to the meeting with you also.
UTK SWE is the place to be if you want to connect with peers who believe in empowering female engineers, grow your network, develop your professional and leadership skills, seek advice from mentors and make new friendships!
We are limited by the bylaws to only have 9 executive officer positions. We try to give enough opportunities to members by creating a multitude of chair positions which include SWEeties, alumni, and TET chairs.
Many people are very involved in SWE and many people run for officer positions. Sometimes it simply depends on which officer positions you run for and how many you run for. Some officer positions are highly competitive, such as President Elect and Vice President of Special Events. Running for more officer positions gives you a higher chance of winning a position, so if you really want a position, you should run for more than one. If you notice there are five people running for one position and only one person running for a different one, it might increase your chances of winning if you run for the less competitive one and also might be better for SWE as an organization.
If you don’t win an officer position, please don’t be discouraged. Sometimes it comes down to the things listed above. We still applaud you for all the hard work you have invested into SWE. Please run for one of our many chair positions and try for an officer position again next year!
SWE facilitates relationships with companies (who sometimes donate money to our organization) so once we have facilitated a relationship and have a contact with that company, it is easiest and best for us to invite the companies back who have already expressed an interest in our organization with their time and donations. If you have a contact at a company who would like to invest their time and resources in SWE, please contact utkswe.president@gmail.com with that information.
While SWE works to combat the disparity of women in engineering, the disparity between men and women are still the largest in certain majors, such as nuclear and computer science. It is hard for us to attract nuclear and computer science companies while having such few nuclear and computer science majors and it is also hard to attract the few nuclear and computer science women engineering students while not having these companies come to our meeting. It is a very difficult problem to solve. While the majority of our general body are chemical engineers and mechanical engineers, the companies attending our general body meetings currently are geared towards that demographic. Please don’t be discouraged if you are in an underrepresented major though. Many of the skills and topics we focus on at our general body meetings will benefit you no matter your major, such at neogtiating salary, undergraduate research, resume workshops, mock interviews, and choosing a minor. It is recommended to be involved in both a technical society within your major to get connections with relevant companies, and a society that can build your professional skills like SWE to maximize benefits.
