Hopkins Undergraduate Engineering Society

Connections That Stick
It’s called the “Tower of Power Half Hour” and the rules are simple: Take a box of spaghetti and two bags of large marshmallows. Then, working as part of a team of five, build the tallest free-standing structure you can in just 30 minutes. No glue, no scissors, no additional building materials are allowed. And if the tower collapses before a student judge can get an accurate measurement, you’re out.

When the Johns Hopkins Undergraduate Engineering Society (HUES) debuted the wacky, sticky contest in February 2008 as a kick-off event to Engineers Week, the group hoped to field 10 teams. They got 39. The winning structure measured five-plus feet, won its team of engineers a couple of $50 gift cards, and spawned what has now become a much-loved annual event. It also did something else: brought students—and even alumni—from across the Whiting School of Engineering together.

“It’s just fun to be part of something that brings people together who normally wouldn’t be together,” says Max Rich ’10, a biomedical engineering and math major. Rich is a founding member of the group and says the Tower of Power Half Hour will return to campus in February for its third year. “You can take the time to get away from classes. You don’t have to stress out about it. Anytime that you get to interact with your peers and work on solving problems with an interdisciplinary perspective is just great.”

There is no dearth of clubs for undergraduates at the Whiting School of Engineering. But what struck Lee Ouyang ’10 not long after he arrived on campus was that many of the clubs were aimed at particular majors or areas of study. “Some of us thought the groups on campus were a little too narrow,” says Ouyang, who founded HUES in 2007 and is co-president with Stephen Reilly ’10. “We just wanted to bring people together to learn about engineering and have fun doing engineering projects.”

HUES member Julie Fogarty ’10, a civil engineering major, joined the group as a sophomore. “Once you move into upper-level courses specific to your major, it’s easy to get disconnected from the engineering community as a whole,” says Fogarty. “While the administration attempts to foster interdepartmental interaction through the Whiting School semester picnics and Engineers Week in the spring, HUES specifically targets students through competitions and community service to make an engineering student’s experience at Hopkins more wellrounded and enjoyable.”

The group, which has 300 students on its mailing list, isn’t just about fun and games (although the Engineering Carnival the group sponsored last year with other Whiting School student groups was a big hit). The group works closely with the Career Center to help promote workshops and job opportunities to specific engineering majors. There’s an annual day of service. And HUES is hoping to sponsor its first Undergraduate Research Conference in the spring semester. “There’s so much engineering research being done at Hopkins,” Ouyang says. “We just wanted to showcase some of the work and highlight projects that might not be far enough along to be accepted by a large conference.”