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Eta Kappa Nu is a unique membership organization dedicated to encouraging and recognizing excellence in the field of electrical and computer engineering. Members consist of students, alumni, and other professionals who have demonstrated exceptional academic and professional accomplishments. Here at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, members of the HKN Alpha Chapter are dedicated to serving the ECE student body by providing resources and services to help students succeed. HKN’s founding father, Maurice Carr, a UIUC student, strongly embodied the principles that the society aspires to seek in its members today: long-term vision, perseverance to carry through ideas to become reality, and social skills to market and obtain acceptance of ideas from peers. Carr first had the idea to create an EE society to promote job placement among students in 1904. This is commonly termed a “professional union” today, but was a rather novel idea at the time. After a few years, however, it was decided that HKN should become an EE honor society and adopt scholarship as one of its chief qualifications. Although scholarship was always a factor when deciding who should be admitted into the organization, it was only one of several; each member admitted had to be collectively judged that they were likely to become leaders of the profession. With those ideals, the organization inducted its first initiate class in 1905. Although HKN started at the University of Illinois, the leaders had a strong desire for the organization to grow nationally. Even before the first initiate class had commenced, several of the previous officers had been elected to serve the national board after it was created. The following year, the Beta chapter of HKN was founded at Purdue University. Subsequently, Ohio State University (Gamma), Illinois Institute of Technology (Delta), and Pennsylvania State University (Epsilon) were founded over the next 3 years, strengthening the national characteristics of HKN. In order to set a definite numerical limit on the proportion of students that could be inducted into the society, in the late 1930’s, national officers had suggested a policy to allow the upper fourth of the junior class eligible for membership (determined by GPA), but the policy was not officially written into the national Constitution until 1947. Today HKN consists of several hundred college chapters spread nationally. It also has several alumni chapters that began publication of the periodical The Bridge to serve as a forum through which students and alumni can interact. National HKN website: http://www.hkn.org |
