The “University of Southern California,” it’s called. But the truth is, southern Californians are not the only ones that make up the university’s population. And that is certainly not true of the Viterbi School of Engineering. Within the Civil and Environmental Engineering department itself, I know students who make a seven-hour drive down from the northern California Bay Area and ones who embark on five-and-a-half-hour flights from Virginia when the semester begins. With that being said, it’s not just this geographical diversity that sets Viterbi apart. It’s the diversity in ideas and personalities that truly elevates Viterbi’s hospitality.
Beginning even before my first official day of classes as a Trojan, I was welcomed onto campus by ten incredible Resident Assistants, or RA’s as we call them, who helped me move into the Parkside Arts and Humanities residence hall on my move-in day for the Viterbi Summer Institute. The Viterbi Summer Institute is a summer bridge program that offers incoming freshman students studying engineering who identify as a minority or underrepresented group to live on campus for a month before the academic year begins and catch a glimpse of what it means to be a college student. Additionally, there are built-in academic opportunities embedded in the program, including a refresher calculus course that students attend twice a week and an undergraduate research component where each student is paired with a research lab within the Viterbi School of Engineering and conducts research for a month. I can say without a doubt that during this month-long experience, I made a tight-knit community of not only engineers but friends. We were all just recent high school graduates thrown into a large campus, but I was able to learn about each of my peers’ individual experiences during high school as well as their journey to USC. Some of them, like me, were local, but others came from across the country and even the world. Learning about their stories and what about engineering interested them was inspiring because each student had a different perspective. It was these newfound perspectives that offered me a sliver of insight into what engineers at Viterbi are capable of achieving.
Throughout my two-and-a-half years at Viterbi, I have had the opportunity to meet students who always introduce me to new ideas and views on not only problem-solving within engineering but on different facets of student life. Beginning with CE106: Introduction to Civil Engineering, I recall working on homework assignments with peers who showed me ways to solve problems in ways I never would have thought or ethical solutions to case studies that would have ever crossed my mind. This pattern would continue and still does, with me always learning a new approach to solving a problem, whether it’s simply for homework or some technical difficulty in the lab component of our class.
Another feature of diversity within engineering simply stems from the vast number of student organizations and opportunities that Viterbi offers its students. Even then, within each individual club or student organization, there are subsets or committees in which students can further find their niche. There are student organizations like the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, or SHPE, the National Society of Black Engineers, NSBE, or the Society of Women Engineers, SWE, all of which offer representation to students who identify with such groups as well as professional development and a social atmosphere for students to meet similar individuals which fosters a nurturing environment. On the other side of the spectrum, there are student organizations that are more project-oriented, called design teams. These organizations span to and from each and every major within Viterbi. There are design teams like Concrete Canoe, Steel Bridge, and Timber Strong, all of which are extensions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, ASCE, and even the Rocket Propulsion Laboratory, RPL, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which integrate students of all different disciplines. Then, you have your computer science and electrical engineering organizations like the student branch of the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society, CAIS++, where students promote the development of AI applications for social good. All of these student organizations, whether they have a more professional focus or design approach, have one thing in common: a cohort of diverse students ready to share their own personal experiences with one another in order to promote the growth of the next generation of engineers.
To me, being an engineer means being innately diverse. A modern engineer must be well-rounded on all fronts. By welcoming students of diverse backgrounds and with unique journeys, Viterbi opens the door to each and every student by surrounding them with new ideas, perspectives, and opportunities. From being prepared to tackle the professional world to being able to work well on a team with others, the ideal engineer is able to succeed in these categories and more. And the engineers who can achieve just that and beyond are the ones found at Viterbi.
