ESS 614: Engineering Student Council

Laura Vogt:
Hello and welcome to the (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. I’m your host Laura Vogt. I’m the Associate Director for Marketing and Communications for the College of Engineering. And this is our final episode of the season and I’m excited to have the Co-Presidents for the Engineering Student Council or ESC here, Ryan Huntley and Tino Trangia. Thank you both so much for being here today.

Ryan Huntley:
Thank you so much. Yeah, we’re both happy to be here. Happy to talk a little bit about ESC and what we do.

Laura Vogt:
So I’m excited to learn more about ESC and what you’ve been doing with your outreach and the work that you do with student organizations. So let’s get to know each of you. Ryan, why don’t you tell me about your major and maybe a student organization that you would recommend and what you do for fun at Berkeley.

Ryan Huntley:
So my major is electrical engineering, computer science. I’m also minoring in data science and Engineering Student Council is actually the only student organization that I’ve been a part of. We represent over 30, 40 other student organizations on campus, all of which are absolutely amazing. We’re very fortunate to have a great group of student organizations to work with. But as far as other things that I do on campus, I live with a bunch of friends in a house and really love spending time with each other. We go for walks on campus, walks up in the hills up above us. Not to mention just going out and find cool places to eat in Berkeley. That’s always something that we do for fun.

Laura Vogt:
Well thank you. And again, thank you for being here today. Tino, same questions for you. What is your major? Is there a student organization that you would recommend and what do you do for fun at Berkeley?

Tino Trangia:
Yeah, so I’m Tino. I’m also a fourth year studying electrical engineering and computer science. And I’m also minoring in data science as well as mechanical engineering. And for me, I’ve been in a couple student organizations, not nearly as long as I’ve been on ESC, but I can say that I really did enjoy my time in them. So if the first one is Space enterprise at Berkeley, they’re a Rocket Street team. They’re super, super welcoming. They really teach you kind of the principles of rocket building and it’s overall, it’s a pretty cool experience getting to work directly hands on with rockets, I guess.

Tino Trangia:
And the other one is pioneers in engineering. They’re a robotics competition for underserved high schools in the Bay Area. So as a mentor I went to these high schools and kind of taught kids about Python, some robotic principles. So that was also a great experience. And as for what I do for fun in Berkeley, I’m a big, big fan of hikes. I like to go into fire trails up in the hills. And also I’m a big foodie, so I like to go around, try different restaurants and also take trips to SF. We’re a lot more foods… There’s a lot more food there than in Berkeley. Yeah.

Laura Vogt:
Well thank you again for being here today. And there are so many things that ESC does for student organizations and just the students in the College of Engineering. And so let’s just start with an overview. What is the Engineering Student Council?

Ryan Huntley:
Yeah, so the Engineering Student Council, like the name suggests, is the official student government for the College of Engineering here at Berkeley. We represent students. We are voted into office by students. And so that is our primary objective. Everything that we do is intended to be on behalf of the students that we have here. And that means a lot of different things. We put on different events for the student body. Our big one of course is engineers week that happens every year. But we have Town Halls, Research Week, a lot of other smaller events on top of that. That’s not dimensional to resources that we provide to students directly through our newsletter and our website. And we also work with Engineering Student Services and departments, the college itself on behalf of the student body. And then the other big half of it is we represent the Engineering Student Clubs on campus. We try and help them realize their full potential and provide the resources that they need to succeed. Because ultimately folks here are collections of students and we want to do whatever we can to support them.

Laura Vogt:
And I know in the last couple of years you’ve done a lot of research and started the Blue and Gold Certification for student organizations. So can you tell me more about what that is and even more importantly, why did you start it?

Tino Trangia:
Yeah, so the Blue and Gold Certification is a program that we worked on in conjunction with ESS. And its goal is to create a more equitable and inclusive environment for student organizations within the College of Engineering. And so what this means is that we’ve created a list of requirements that make the application process for organizations more accessible to all students. Some examples include no GPA minimums, no transcripts, no resumes and no technical interviews. So all of this is with the goal of just having these in your learning experiences. These clubs offer a lot of resources for students to maybe get some more experience with their field or also just to get a more holistic college experience. And so we want that to be as available to every student as possible. So we created this program and the flip side is that these organizations in return for following our requirements, they receive funding from us as well as ESS.

Tino Trangia:
We also receive resources such as facility space in Bechtel and finally just get a publicity in marketing through different career fairs, newsletters, et cetera. This program has been in development for about three years and it’s, was originally conceived because we’ve noticed a lot of elitism within a lot of student organizations on campus, especially within the College of Engineering. And so our previous former president, he was the one who kind of launched this program and has since been… it’s been transformative over the years. It originally started as a simple affiliation process for ESC, which just limited who we affiliated with. And then eventually we got stakeholders such as ESS, College of Engineering, the deans, and we go with that support. We’ve kind of grown the program to what it is now.

Laura Vogt:
Well, that’s awesome, thank you. I know we’ve got the list of how many of the student organizations that are certified, but how many are there now?

Ryan Huntley:
Right now we have a little over 30 organizations, but by the time this airs we anticipate that we’ll have 40 or perhaps even 50. We’re doing a second round of applications.

Laura Vogt:
And is there a deadline if student orgs hear about this and want to go through the process?

Ryan Huntley:
So usually we ask that all student organizations apply for certification at the end of every year. But because we had some miscommunications about that this past year, we’re actually going to open up a second round just in a couple of days though again. Yeah, by the time this is out, that’ll probably have passed. Most student organizations should have heard about it already. And if you are a new student organization, you actually do not need to apply for your first year, you’re automatically granted certification and then at the end of the year you can apply more formally for the following year.

Laura Vogt:
Nice, thank you. So what other type of events does ESC offer throughout the year?

Tino Trangia:
Yeah, so as Ryan briefly mentioned, we have a variety of events that we hold for a student body. And he mentioned Engineers Week, which is a week long celebration of engineering that occurs every spring semester. We put on a lot of different giveaways for students. We give away a lot of merchandise, t-shirts just to kind of bolster the student mental health. We have fun events like Tie Dying for example, in the past or building Lego plant pots, movie nights, Carnival booth. And all of this is in celebration. We also have some events such as career panels. We’ve had, in the past a workshop of Google to talk about inclusivity in the workspace. And at the end of this week we have what is called Engineers Ball or E-Ball, which is a homecoming style dance right on campus. And it’s a super fun event where everyone just comes celebrates, there’s free food, there’s music, and it’s a really great experience for everyone.

Tino Trangia:
So besides Engineers Week, we also have events throughout the semester. Our big one is the Town Halls. We have two to three of these a semester and they’re an opportunity for the student body to give feedback to college administration. We usually have some sort of… A set list of topics such as equity or maybe talking about a specific curriculum. And we invite students to come and speak their mind and have discussion about these different issues. Another event is Research Week and this is something that we’re planning to hold more frequently. It connects students to research mentors and labs, gives students tours as well as connections to professors to help break them into research. So that’s another one of our events.

Laura Vogt:
That’s great. Let’s change topics just a little bit again and what are some of the resources that you offer to students?

Ryan Huntley:
I’d love to talk about this. I actually was the Technical Director for EST last year. So I managed our website, which we are slowly converting into a resource hub for really all students, but primarily engineering students here at Berkeley. First and foremost, we really like to offer a lot of the resources that we have to student organizations because we feel that that’s the best use of the funding and the spaces and all that we have access to. So we really try and give a lot of that away. And again, that’s through the Blue and Gold Certification Program that we’ve done already. But we also have our weekly newsletter, which highlights a lot of events that clubs have. Events that are put on by the College of Engineering and also events that we do ourselves. We have Research Week that we put on every year. Sometimes we have other smaller events, some of which Tino talked about.

Ryan Huntley:
We try and highlight those as well. Those are great resources, great opportunities for students. And then anything that the college provides as well as just links to things the university provides in general. We like to consolidate those on our website so that students can find them in a place that’s really easy to access. We have resource pages, we highlight mental health resources, accessibility resources, food resources, really anything that students might find that’s on our website. So actually if you are listening to this right now and you’re curious about some of these resources, definitely recommend going to esc.berkeley.edu and looking around there you’ll find a lot of helpful information.

Laura Vogt:
Ryan, you were saying, or I guess not to Ryan because you have this as a Tino question. There… What are the opportunities for students that would like to join ESC or be part of ESC?

Tino Trangia:
Yeah, so for ESC we consist of a different… A Variety of different committees. We have I think seven committees right now. These include Internal Vice President, External Vice President, Technical Communications, Equity and Inclusion and Engineers Week. And each committee has different purposes and different functions. For example, Internal, this Vice President is our main event planning committee. They put on a lot of the Town Halls as well as the Research Week. And then we have Engineers Week, which obviously plans all the engineers week activities and then external works with Blue and Gold and other student organizations as well as outreach to a ACC, the lead center and other outside organizations.

Tino Trangia:
And so if students want to become involved in these committees, they can just apply on our website. We have our application form there. It’s a rolling basis year round and it’s a very simple process. You just fill your application, kind of note your interests, choose which committee you’re interested in and then what we do is we set up a quick coffee chat to kind of gauge exactly what committee to put you on. And this is not an interview. We accept pretty much everyone, it’s more of a way to just get to know each of our committee, each of our prospective committee members.

Laura Vogt:
I feel like it’s a good idea to know what their interests are too because you have just a lot of different things that they can be part of.

Tino Trangia:
So as a committee member you have a lot of opportunity to take initiative and get involved in a lot of different projects. I used to be on the External Vice President committee and so I got the opportunity to work directly with Blue and Gold, at least in its initial stages, kind of writing up the policies. Some other committees, for example, Technical Committee, you would get a lot of hands on experience with web development, working on our website and getting resources for students like Ryan said, getting these resources publicized.

Laura Vogt:
And so both of you have talked about how much you like working for ESC. So do you have your favorite memory of it that you’d like to share?

Ryan Huntley:
Yeah, I can start with that. This isn’t a particular memory, more so a collection of memories, but over summer 2020, obviously this was peak COVID and none of us had too much going on. One of my main form of social interaction was actually playing some online board games with ESC. We would have weekly game nights with our organization and we’d play kind of anything we could get our hands on, people would suggest random games. And it was always just a ton of fun. During that time we were all looking for… We were all looking for whatever connections we could make and having so many great people at ESC to spend time with every week was really an incredible thing to have at that moment. So I think looking back, that’s probably got to be my answer to that question.

Tino Trangia:
Yeah, I do have to second Ryan that those weekly game nights were one of the things that kept me sane during the Pandemic. So it was definitely a great experience. Another memory that I had was actually in my freshman year after our Engineers Ball. So yeah, I was working pretty hard throughout the entire week putting on these Engineers Week events. I was doing a lot of event playing, volunteering to kind of facilitate events. And so Engineers Ball was just a great way to de-stress and it kind of was like seeing all this hard work come to fruition and afterwards we had great time with the other executives and community members to kind of bond over this whole event that we had.

Laura Vogt:
That’s great. It’s nice that you have some good memories of this. So how can students learn about upcoming events or new resources?

Tino Trangia:
So from ESC we have multiple ways of communicating, but most of our events will be posted on Instagram as well as Facebook. So we really encourage people to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, I think our Instagram handle is @BerkeleyESC. We also have our weekly newsletter. This is something that people can sign up on via our website. And so we’ll send out emails about different events, not just from ESC but also college events, ESS related events, and just generally some resources as well.

Laura Vogt:
Is there anything we haven’t talked about today that either of you would like to add?

Ryan Huntley:
One thing I would like to bring up, and I touched on this earlier, but we are student representatives at the end of the day and we’re actually voted into office by students. This happens during spring semester every year and we advertise on our Instagram and in our newsletters. But I’d just like to take a moment to bring it up here. Please do come out and hear speeches for the next group of officers and vote in who you think would best represent you in the following school year. That’s ultimately like the best way that we do get student input and that’s what makes our organization the official student government of the College of Engineering. So do come out and do vote.

Laura Vogt:
Tino, did you have anything?

Tino Trangia:
Yeah, I just want to pick back up Ryan and say that not only can you vote, but you can also run for, obviously run for these positions. And I think that if you want to really get involved with the university, talking to the administration and you really want to make change in the College of Engineering, I definitely recommend not only getting involved in a committee as I said earlier, but taking the time to get to know ESC and find a position that you’re interested in running for and go for it.

Laura Vogt:
Well thank you both so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time, especially because the fall semester’s just started and I know it’s always a little bit more chaotic at that time.

Ryan Huntley:
Absolutely. Think I speak for Tino myself when I say we’re both happy to be here and glad we can contribute to the podcast, where we really value what you’ve been doing to make all this available to students. It’s a really great cause and yeah, we’re happy to be here.

Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you again and thank you to everyone for listening this week. It’s our last episode for season six, but we’ll be back in the spring with new discussions and more resources. Bye.