[UCLA IEEE] Winter 2025 Wrap Up
We did it! Let's look back to see all we accomplished this quarter...
President
Hi everyone!
What a quarter we have had! Winter quarter is often regarded as the most difficult quarter of every year, and this year was no exception. However, every officer on board has worked extremely hard on ensuring that the general members experience was impacted as little as possible, and I am grateful for the wonderful community within IEEE that allows us to do what we do.
The board started working hard before the quarter even began with 21 officers and 4 general members attending the 2025 Rising Stars conference held in Las Vegas, NV. There, we won two (!!) awards for Best Advanced Group Project and Best Beginner Group Project for WRAP and OPS respectively. Additionally, not only is this our third year attending with the largest group from UCLA yet, we also had the largest student group in attendance. We were extremely proud to represent UCLA and network with inspiring and innovative students and professionals.
Shortly after the quarter began, the devastating fires in Los Angeles led to the postponement of IDEA Hacks 2025 as well as many other planned events. In times like these, I am always reminded and deeply grateful for the strength, generosity, and optimism that our community embodies. Every year, officers have to deal with new challenges, and I am proud that every year, the board continues to not only pull it off but turn these situations into opportunities to continuously improve and embolden our community!
Looking to Spring quarter, we have many exciting events and opportunities: IDEA Hacks 2025, officer elections, exciting conclusions to our 5 projects, and more! As always, my inbox is open, and if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me. Thank you to our alumni, faculty, and general members for helping us create such a wonderful year so far. I am very excited to see what the last quarter of the year will bring!
Best,
Theo Zhang
Internal Vice President
Glad to see you all at more of our events this quarter! We had a successful Winter GM with a record breaking number 😱 for typical winter quarters!! Throughout the quarter we also had the MovIEEE social with one too many minions, the Dessert and Destress Social 🍪🍬where we decorated some delicious sweet treats, and the Hotpot Social where we all ate our money’s worth 😈
We also held our annual IEEExSociety of Women Engineers (SWE) Mocktail Mixer and had company representatives from Silvus, Northrop Grumman, Gannett Fleming TranSystems, Aerospace Corporation, and Ping Identity, as well as our favorite EE professors, come and mingle with attendees!
Our FamilIEEEs also had their own fun, holding events and completing quests! A lot of BPlate frozen yogurt 🍦was eaten, and many artistic creations were made toward the end of the quarter 🎨🎤 Bigs and Littles have continued to meet up, and we even have some pairs meeting up with other pairs! 👯🧑🧑🧒🧒
I look forward to our last quarter of events together, and can’t wait to see you all soon 😇
Best,
Rachel Yen
External Vice Presidents
IDEAHacks is officially rescheduled to occur from May 2-4 during the Spring Quarter! Thank you to everyone who has been patient with us as we navigated through unexpected events 😣Get ready to Supercharge your creativity with the biggest hardware hackathon on the West Coast!!!!!!
If you’re interested in hacking or serving as a judge, reach out to the EVPs for more details. More updates coming soon—stay tuned!
Recharging,
Eugenia & Evan
Treasurer
Hello hello!
I hope everyone has had a wonderful time getting involved with IEEE this quarter, whether it be through our projects, workshops, socials, etc. There’s a lot more to come for next quarter so make sure to keep an eye out on our events! Whether it be IDEAHacks, project capstones and competitions, or anything else, make sure to join so you don’t miss out on anything fun or tasty (and free)!
Have a lovely break!
Jace
Publicity
Hey guys!
Somehow we’ve made it to the end of winter quarter–time goes by so fast. This quarter we released our SECOND electrical engineering rizz video, which now has almost half a million views 🤩(IEEE at UCLA got that rizz fr, stay tuned for another..?). Like Theo and Rachel said, we’ve had numerous events this quarter which I have had the joy of documenting and recapping on our Instagram (make sure to follow @uclaieee if you don’t already)!
Next quarter in spring, we will be releasing some general member merch‼️And guess what? YOU🫵 can be the potential designer of this merch that every IEEE at UCLA member will wear. Our Merch Contest will be open for submissions until Sunday, March 30th, so be sure to submit your designs at tinyurl.com/ieeemerch25!
Have an epic spring break, and thank you for being a part of IEEE!
See you next quarter,
Heidi 😁
Secretary
Hi everyone!
This quarter has been an exciting one, with a few new changes to the newsletter and more AMP meetings involving both alumni mentors and undergraduate mentees. I’ve really enjoyed learning from and getting to know these passionate alumni and students who make this program possible. I’m excited to see how the program grows next quarter and in the years to come. Have a great spring break! 🙂
Sincerely,
Emily Kuczynski
Events Coordinators
Hihi~
It’s been so lovely sharing so much joy with all of you this quarter. We’re ecstatic for IDEA Hacks next quarter—so get ready for epic food and some heavy-duty carb-loading! We’re also looking forward to the annual all-nighter at AAMC and plenty of fancy-shmancy festivities at the End-of-Year Banquet. Rest assured, we’ll continue to keep you well-fed and well-roomed.
Can you believe we hosted 56 (yes, FIFTY-SIX!) events in just 10 weeks? Thank you for being the absolute best crowd to plan for. Always feel free to say hi (or yell if you’re far away) when you see us around!
Live Laugh Love your events coords,
Amy & Emily L
Corporate Relations
Hey y’all! Thanks for coming out to Lumitron, Spectrant, and Texas Instruments this quarter — hope everyone learned something about these amazing companies! Stay tuned for spring quarter, we got some big events planned! (Make sure to show up to IDEA Hacks, we got representatives from some great companies coming!!)
– Jerry
Outreach Coordinators
Hey y’all!
Yet another great quarter of outreach! In January, we brought UCLA IEEE to the national stage at the Rising Stars Conference in Las Vegas; showcasing our wonderful projects at the conference, we were able to snag two awards: OPS and WRAP won 1st place for beginner and advanced projects, respectively! And despite the fires derailing some of our planned events, we still had an eventful winter, tabling at SWE’s flagship event,“Hi, Engineer!”, and hosting a couple outreach committee socials. In the meantime, we’ve been cooking up a lot of events for Spring quarter, working with our community college students to prepare their spring workshop rotation.
Speaking of Spring Quarter, we have a lot of very cool events coming up. We have workshops at two community colleges, IDEA Hacks, and our very own high school event on campus, Engineering Horizons. It’s about to be the most lively quarter of the year! As always, if you’re interested in getting involved and helping out your local community, let us know by signing up for the Outreach Committee here.
Have a great spring break, and we hope to see you all around!
Cheerio,
Ethan and Josh
Webmaster
Hello! We’ve certainly got some updates to share with y’all.
First of all, we’ve updated the ieeebruins website to include dark mode and other minor UI changes. We’ve also added some cool UI changes and animations to the IDEA Hacks website. We are currently in the process of redesigning the IDEA Hacks website to utilize more of the amazing design team assets (keep a lookout for that soon). Anyways, we’re looking forward to Spring quarter, where we can officially put the website to use in the 11th annual IDEA Hacks!
— Kevin
Project and Lab Managers
Hi everyone!
Thank you to everyone who's been a part of IEEE this quarter. Whether you're in a project, attending our workshops and socials, or just hanging out in the IEEE lab, we applaud your efforts to enrich your EE skills and appreciate your time with us as a member of our engineering community. If you haven't already, tell us what you think about our projects and workshops here -- it'll only take a minute!
Next quarter, we'll be conducting interviews for those of you who would like to lead a project or run workshops next year. If you'd like to contribute to IEEE and teach the next class of project members -- even if you think you're underqualified (trust me, most candidates think this and it's never true) -- we encourage you to apply! It's a great experience where you hone your project skills further, become an amazing public speaker, and hang out with an amazing community of officers -- and even if you don't get the position you apply for, you'll have our utmost respect for trying anyway :)
Regardless, thanks for a great quarter and we hope to see you again in spring! It's time to round out those capstones and show off all that you've learned in our annual Projects Showcase. See you then!
~ Parth and Prem
OPS
HEY OPS! Thank you guys so much for an amazing quarter! We learned about switches, signals, inductors, transistors, and different forms of serial communication. These concepts accumulated into two big hardware and software projects: iPoduino and GameBuino. We had our iPoduino Competition where you guys showed off your musical talent and we are looking forward to the beginning of Spring Quarter where you guys will showcase your gaming skills at our GameBuino competition. Thank you for a fantastic quarter!
— Wyatt and Noosha
Micromouse
Hello Micromousers! Thank you all for the hard work you put in this Winter Quarter! Although the beginning of the quarter was challenging for many teams due to the fires, I’m incredibly proud to see so many of you persevere. It’s been exciting to watch your PCB designs evolve from simple schematics to fully realized boards ready for ordering.
This quarter, you’ve learned how to design your own Micromouse PCB and improve maze-solving strategies through the Floodfill lecture. Next quarter, we can’t wait to see your designs come to life as you bring everything together in preparation for the All-American Micromouse Competition, where you’ll have the chance to achieve fame and glory!
P.S. Y’all should’ve came to our Floodfill lecture—we had free boba! 😉
Looking forward to an exciting next quarter!
— Nathan and Michael :)
Pocket Racers
Hey Pocket Racers!
It’s been a great year, but the fun is far from over. In the fundamentals track, you’ve built your racer, trained a convolutional neural network to identify playing cards, and performed classical computer vision techniques to identify signs with which you can control your racer. We are building the next set of labs for you, and we’re hoping to give you a really fun set of labs for our last quarter. Look forward to driving your car very soon!
On the Pocket Research side, we’ve done quite a bit. We learned a lot about networking, ROS, Linux, and AWS. Now, we’re ready to start gathering data and training our model to race. This Spring quarter will be a fun one, we’ll finally see our racers driving on their own, and we’ll get to have fun tweaking and adding onto the machine learning pipeline. I’m excited to see what we accomplish in the next 10 weeks!
— Holden and Jerard
WRAP
Great work this quarter! Can’t wait for next quarter!
— Nat and Victor
Research & Development
Hello friends, it’s me. This has been a pretty good quarter for R&D. SPI has been poppin off: Andrew and Harerta recently cased their first guitar pedal! <Video>.
Josh and Pepper have been making extremely cursed falstad simulations, and have also started tasting their instruments’ waveforms(literally with their tongues).
Seth’s Sethla Coil was fried and unfried, and now he is trying to implement feedback resonance.
Prabhvir, who has been working on Codename FF has made some cool wheels and mechanical contraptions.
Basim has made a working 6 cell braille display, and is now experimenting with different mechanical actuators. You can see and follow more of his progress here!
Parth has made the insane PCB coil grid for his Chess Board, and tested it too!
— Sanjit
Workshops
Hey everyone!
Thank you to everyone who came to our workshops this quarter! This quarter, we hosted 4 workshops with great turnout and fun projects. We got to see workshoppers zap themselves at the electrifying slayer exciter coil workshop and everyone watched as the workshops leads got fooled during the April Fools makeshop. Here’s some a cool pic from a coil working at the workshop:
If you weren't able to attend one of these workshops but still want to see what you missed, feel free to ask one of us as always! We have more exciting workshops planned next quarter and hope y’all show those some love too. As always, stay curious and have a great break!
— Jessie and Kai
Thanks for reading!
And that’s the end! Thank you everyone for an amazing winter quarter, and we look forward to seeing you all soon!
—IEEE at UCLA Board
