Outside of Class

When you are looking for a school, part of what you are looking for is the curriculum and you should certainly lay our curricula next to national standards and those of other schools you are considering. However, a lot of the learning that happens in college happens outside of the class room, so you are also looking for an engaged community of students and faculty who are exploring things outside of class. We have a number of strategies for creating a rich community in our department because that encourages our students to be involved in a wide variety of activities.

Our alumni have recognized this and generously donate to support giving every student two T-shirts: one for the department when they are freshmen and one for the program they are pursuing when they are juniors. Every Wednesday is t-shirt day so the whole campus knows who we are. In addition, our students have t-shirts for extracurricular activities.

Clubs

Programming Team: A fun way to improve your programming skills is to participate in programming competitions.

Not So Hidden Figures:  A club dedicated to supporting women in science and engineering by honing their skills and creating community. This club is open to any student interested in a more inclusive environment within STEM.

Software Engineering Club: A group of students who pick out a project to work on each semester. Then they plan and execute the project during that semester. Past projects have been entered into (and won) D2L’s national competition.

Game Dev Club: A student organization that allows students of all majors to participate in the design and development process of video game creation. Has taken students to video game conventions on multiple occasions to present their games as an indie game studio.
More Information: Videogame Development Club - Shippensburg University

Networking Club:  Our networking club plays with a variety of networking topics.  They play with our software controlled radios and networking protocols.  This year, they are working on activities targeted at passing Cisco's CCENT certification.

BAJA SAE Club: An automotive engineering focused group that designs and builds a single-seat, all-terrain vehicle for competitions.
More Information: Shippensburg University - Baja SAE Project

Upsilon Pi Epsilon Honor Society: The premiere international honor society for computer sciences. Students need to have a 3.5 or higher GPA and 60 credits to be eligible.

Recent Events

• Daniel Diehl had the privilege of attending an awards dinner hosted by ASME’s SERAD (Safety Engineering & Risk Analysis Division - ASME) board during IMECE (International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Expo). This trip was funded through the donations to the Shippensburg University Foundation.  This year (2025) the conference was held from the 16th to the 20th of November in Memphis, TN. On behalf of himself and his partner Sekou McLean, Daniel accepted the award for “1st Place Undergraduate Research Paper for Innovation and Ingenuity that Encourages Risk Analysis and Improves Safety.” During the awards dinner he had the opportunity to meet and network with many fellow researchers. These students came from all over, some as close to the conference as University of Little Rock Arkansas, and some as far as Brazil. Everyone was there to either accept an award or present their own independent research. He had an interesting conversation with a fellow undergraduate student who was working on biomechanical prosthetics and ways to make them safer. There were also graduate students both at the Master and PhD level who discussed their research endeavors and shared ideas on how to secure more funding, where to find good resources, and people they should contact. He had a lot of conversations with the Master students about what graduate school was like at other universities and about careers; many students plan to stay in academia for their career as researchers or even professors. Toward the end of the night, he had a chance to interact with some of the board members who are all highly educated individuals with their own wealth of engineering expertise. Being able to interact with so many brilliant minds was an invaluable experience.

• The Ship BAJA team travelled to JLG’s R&D machine shop in Greencastle on February 28. It was fantastic trip where the team spent over two hours touring and talking to JLG’s manufacturing engineers. It was an amazing experience for the students and we hope to be able to plan more trips there in the future!
  
• Our BAJA student club attended the SAE BAJA competition this fall in Nashport, OH. It was been an inspiring experience as they represented Shippensburg University for the first time in this international event! This would not have been possible without support from the Foundation, Volvo, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering.  The students worked hard on this project, working relentlessly during the summer to finish the construction of the buggy on time. During the competition, the team got to interact with teams from other colleges from the U.S., Mexico, and Canada.