Upsilon Pi Epsilon

What is Upsilon Pi Epsilon?

Upsilon Pi Epsilon (abbreviated UPE or ΥΠΕ) is a collegiate honor society for the computing and information disciplines. Founded in 1967 at Texas A&M, it seeks to recognize academic exellence, expand personal and professional opportunities for its members, and support high quality education in the discipline. It is endorsed by the Association for Computing Machinery ACM is the world's largest scientific and educational society for the computing disciplines. It hosts conferences, publishes open-access research, and sponsors other computer-science events like collegiate competitive programming.as well as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization for electrical and electronics engineering. Not only does it publish research and host conferences, but it also sets crucial technology standards that enable our entire electrical and telecommunication networks to function.and it boasts over 300 student chapters internationally.

UPE logo, simplified for graphics at the UCLA Beta Chapter. The logo, also called the Key, features a zero and one, the founding year in binary, and the greek letter initials. Upsilon is the first letter of the greek word for "computer," Pi is the first letter of the greek word for "information," and Epsilon is the first letter of the greek word for "science."

UPE at UCLA

What We Do

UPE is billed as an honor society, but it does much more than simply confer certain perks upon its members. In fact, many of its day-to-day functions are actually more service-oriented, and each upholds the overall mission of uplifting such a young field of study.

One of the most impactful and well-known services that UPE provides is free, year-round, walk-in tutoring for anyone who needs help with classes in the discipline. Officers organize a tutoring schedule to maintain an open space from 9am–5pm every day between the second and second-to-last weeks of each quarter, and each officer posts their name with a list of classes they can tutor on this schedule for anyone to view ahead of time. In addition, UPE officers organize review sessions ahead of midterms and finals for every lower-division CS class and even some of the first few upper-divs in the curriculum.

UPE also organizes professional events like tech talks, resume workshops, fireside chats with entrepeneurs, and even an exclusive career fair for members. These help introduce students to the professional world and provide opportunities to network with real industry professionals. UPE also helped to jump start the UCLA Computer Science Department's Industrial Affiliates Program, wherein companies pay an annual fee for exclusive access to recruitment within the CS department. That money then funds the department and official student organizations, all of whom work together to create opportunities for students. It's a virtuous cycle that embodies the sybmiotic relationship between industry and academia.

More recently, UPE has collaborated with other student organizations to host a biannual Town Hall as an open forum for students to provide feedback about the CS curriculum to department faculty. This has proved surprisingly fruitful for students and faculty alike and has even resulted in new or modified classes for everyone's benefit.

Computer Science Town Hall that UPE co-hosted with ACM and exploretech.la, two other student organizations sanctioned by the CS Department. Topics discussed included EDI initiatives and some curriculum adjustments. (that's me circled in red, I helped organize the event and represent UPE as a speaker <3)

Induction

At UCLA, getting inducted into UPE is a quarter-long process that starts with an invitation sent out en masse to the top third of students by GPA with junior or senior standing (the cutoff is usually between 3.7 and 3.9 depending on the year) in the following majors:

• Computer Science
• Computer Science and Engineering
• Computer Engineering
• Linguistics and Computer Science
• Mathematics of Computation

If a candidate accepts the invite, they attend an orientation and the induction process starts. Throughout the quarter, they must attend a number of professional and social events, complete a coding challenge, perform a mock technical interview, participate in our tutoring program, and finally attend the induction ceremony.

Before I joined, one of the previous UPE execs had instituted a program akin to the big-little system in Greek life and called it the Bit-Byte System (how cute, right?). A group of officers would volunteer to serve as bytes and be assigned a group of about 4-5 bits⁠—⁠new induction candidates. This created a wholesome entry point into the program by giving everyone an opportunity to make friends and have an officer answer questions or help with induction requirements.

The bit-byte group I inducted with. At the furthest left is me. The next furthest left was our byte. I think we were just grabbing dinner somewhere, but we got points on a leaderboard for doing things together and providing evidence it happened.

At the end of the quarter, those who satisfy all the requirements are invited to the induction ceremony, a particularly cultish affair, and a subsequent banquet in their honor. Though I am technically duty-bound to protect intimate secrets about this ceremony, I can share that we dress nice, turn all the lights off, set up some candles, read a spooky script, and take an oath to uphold the mission of UPE.

My Involvement

Getting Inducted

I inducted into UPE during the spring quarter of my freshman year. I got the invite like everyone else and thought it might be a good way to build some connections with upperclassmen. There's no better frank advice about which professors or classes to avoid or how to land an internship than the slightly jaded, war-torn junior or senior.

My byte was actually the original creator of the bit-byte program, so he took it pretty seriously and made us feel welcome in his own wholesome frat-bro kind of way. The social events were fun, if a bit awkward at first. We would do some of the local stuff like getting boba in Westwood or taking the Big Blue Bus out to the Santa Monica pier. The professional events were pretty standard, besides the occasional, covetted FAANG-hosted workshop. I do remember that the coding challege that year was particularly fun and unique. We were tasked with developing a program to play hangman with a server through a REST API. The catch was that all the phrases were famous rap lyrics, so we had to deal with all the slang, abbrieviations, and profanity that came with the territory.

Joining the Officer Board

Near the end of each induction cycle, new recruits have the opportunity to join the board of UPE officers through an election process. Still focused on my original intent, I threw my hat into the ring for one of the Corporate Chair positions. In UPE or any other collegiate honor society, the best benefits and perks come from taking an active role in the program. Not only do you get to meet amazing people, but you get first dibs by staying in the know about opportunities that campus provides or you yourself create. I was lucky enough to be elected and took on the role during my sophomore year.

UPE Officer Board at the end of the 2018-19 school year. To celebrate another successful year, we set up a banquet with superlatives, activities, and a photobooth.

As one of the Corporate Chairs, I was tasked with setting up a handful of professional events with our Industrial Affiliates. This involves getting into contact with a company representative, collaborating to design a relevant talk or workshop, securing the facilities needed to host the event, drumming up some buzz about it, and finally executing on the day of the event. The one I was most proud of setting up was a panel where we invited UCLA alumni Googlers and a Google recruiter to answer questions about what it's like as a new grad in FAANG. We had a line out the door, catered pita sandwiches, and some cool conversations about technical rigor and imposter syndrome.

Presidency

Alright, let's talk shop. One of the first orders of business for the incoming UPE Executive Board (i.e. the President, Internal Vice President, and External Vice President) is to make any adjustments to the board structure that is necessary for the times. That year, we were coming back in person after a long while online, so we needed to create systems that were flexible to the dynamic nature of COVID that loomed at the time. Take a look at the structure we designed:

Organizational hierarchy for 2021–2022 UPE Officer Board. The Internal and External teams were well defined, but auxiliary tasks had not been collected under any structure, so we decided to form the Core team and have the President lead this directly. Advocacy was a recent addition, and Finance and Facilities was created to help with the return to in-person operations.

Organizational hierarchy for 2021–2022 UPE Officer Board. The Internal and External teams were well defined, but auxiliary tasks had not been collected under any structure, so we decided to form the Core team and have the President lead this directly. Advocacy was a recent addition, and Finance and Facilities was created to help with the return to in-person operations.

Each overarching team is headed by an exec, and each committee has as many chairs as it needs, for a total of about forty-some-odd officers. That's admittedly a lot to manage, but for the scale of membership and the amount of events we put on each year, it's just enough to get by, especially considering that for most officers, UPE is not their primary extra-curricular activity.

To consolidate communications amongst a large board, we finally migrated away from a disconnected set of Messenger group chats towards something a bit more organized and accessible for the student body: a public Discord. We needed a platform that could accomodate officers, members, alumni, and one-off students simultaneously. To keep adequate privacy and separation of concerns, we developed multiple levels of permissions across all parties, with many public and private channels in which everyone could interact. This change was crucial to the hybrid return to campus, where we never really knew when things might transition back online on short notice due to a COVID spike.

Most of the committees are pretty self-explanatory, but I'd like to highlight some focuses of that year's board. Advocacy was a budding area of operation for UPE, necessitated by the changing landscape of technological and social progress. This chair was in charge of collecting demographic data and feedback about the accessibility of our programs as well as helping the exec board with the biannual CS Town Halls. A Finance and Facilities officer was added that year to help officers reintegrate our services onto campus. Publicity and Multimedia were split to accomodate an increased workload and enable a dedicated rebranding effort.

With these structural changes, it was my personal goal to make UPE a more service-oriented organization. UPE collects the smartest and best-resourced students around, and it has close connections to the CS department, so it has always had to fight the allegations that it's nothing more than a circle-jerk. Not everyone sees UPE the way I described itearlier in the article,so I wanted to show the student body what we could do for them using our reach and influence.

To address this, we changed the character of many of our events. Instead of providing the same tired workshops, we strived to meet students where they were at. We helped create opportunities for students not interested in FAANG by building out a startup tier in the Industrial Affiliates Program. We partnered with EDI-focused student orgs for key events. We helped make the faculty and department less opaque for students through Town Halls and fun events like a Hot Ones Hot Ones is a popular internet show where a celebrity interview is conducted while eating progressively spicier chicken wings. We adopted this format with our professors as the celebrities.style interview with professors. We recorded talks and events for greater accessibility and posterity. We revamped some of our tutoring pedagogy.

All of this and more was made possible by taking advantage of our unique time and the resources we had at our disposal. It's easy to be jaded and tunnel-visioned as a college student in STEM, but as the proverbial cream of the crop, we resolved to share our successes with as many people as we could. As I find my way through my early career, I hope I can continue to give back like I did back then.