Finding friends, building community

Axel Vega-Mancinas struggled to find other students of Hispanic or Latinx heritage who were interested in engineering at his high school in Virginia. Caitlyn Gonzalez had a similar experience at her high school in California, so much so that she founded a Society of Women Engineers chapter that focused on recruiting from traditionally underrepresented groups. Even Ana Aguilar, who grew up in Puerto Rico, said that while many of her classmates were interested in medicine, far fewer were interested in engineering.

When Aguilar came to Harvard in 2022, one of the first things she did was join the Harvard Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), a student organization affiliated with the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

Harvard represented a big change in Aguilar’s life, her first extended period of time living in the continental U.S., and SHPE proved an easy way to make friends.

“I just really wanted a community that represented people like me, Hispanic women, Hispanic people in general, in engineering,” she said. “There are so few of us in each engineering class, so being able to have that community of more experienced, older college students that have already been through the internship search process, have already done research, know what tools they used to stand out, that was very attractive to me.”

This past year, Aguilar, a third-year biomedical engineering concentrator at SEAS, became president of the club, which currently has more than 100 members. Her goal: to grow SHPE’s presence on campus and increase fundraising efforts. 

“So far we’ve been working on building new partnerships and sponsorships for the club to be able to fund certain events,” said Vega-Mancinas, a second-year electrical engineering concentrator.  “The goal for this year is to increase funding, and already we’ve surpassed the funding that we had in previous years.”

SHPE’s on-campus networking events are a major draw for members and newcomers alike.

“I was very shy when I was a freshman,” said Eric Vasquez, a fourth-year computer science concentrator. “I would encourage everyone to jump in. Come to the events. Everyone here is very social, very kind, and people will want to talk to you. The community is all about networking and getting to know each other.

Gonzalez first learned about SHPE during Visitas last May. Now a first-year planning to study mechanical engineering at SEAS with the goal of working in aerospace, Gonzalez said the group has been essential on a campus that was largely unknown in her community back home.

“Being able to be around my people at a place where I don’t know many people, it helps me have that foundation to excel in both my academics and social life,” she said. “I’m definitely looking forward to the networking aspect. What significantly helped me in high school was being able to be part of organizations that point you in areas to meet people. That’s helped me with every student activity I’ve ever done, and I hope that will help me here.”

Harvard SHPE’s signature event is a trip to the national convention, which this year will take place in Anaheim in late October. The group first formed in the fall of 2016 as a way to send two members, Cesar Maeda and Daisy Evariz, to the national conference, and their experience at the event paved the way for SHPE becoming a fully recognized SEAS club at the end in May 2017.

Emily Figueirido, a fourth-year applied math concentrator at SEAS, first got involved with the club last year in large part because she wanted to attend the convention.

“Both career-wise and socially, I became really close with the other students who went,” said Figuerido, the club’s director of events. “We’d help each other, and it was a really good time. I spoke to a lot of recruiters, and actually got the internship I did this summer at the conference. It was really just an eye-opening experience.”

Past SHPE board members include: Daniela Villafuerte, S.B. ‘23, who’s now a consultant with Oliver Lyman in Boston; Andrea Rodriguez-Marin Freudmann, S.B. ‘20, now pursuing a Ph.D. in oceanography at the University of California-San Diego; Rebecca Gracia, S.B. ‘18, now a senior interconnection performance engineer at Qcells USA Corp. in California; and Mirian Vargas, A.B. ‘23, who just completed an advanced mechanical design internship at GE Aerospace while pursuing her master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Cornell.

SHPE’s next big event will be a networking session with Capital One on October 17, an event co-organized with the Harvard Society of Black Scientists and Engineers and the Harvard Undergraduate Latinxs in Finance and Technology.

“SHPE is a great opportunity to meet other engineers in a more intimate setting that you know probably have had similar experience to you as a Hispanic or Latinx student,” said Aguilar. “You’ll meet people that have gone through the exact same struggles that you have and have still been able to make a name for themselves, do research, do internships and get all these opportunities that have otherwise seemed quite hard to reach. That’s what is really attractive about our community.”