📝 Editorial: 75 Years of Showing Up
There is no trophy for showing up.
No certificate for driving to Macomb County at 7 AM on a Saturday to help a nervous eighth-grader calibrate a circuit. No medal for joining a committee call on a Tuesday night after a full day of work. No award for baking a pie and carrying it across town to celebrate a number.
And yet — here we are. Seventy-five years of it.
When a handful of Wayne State engineers formed the ACCEMITES in 1934, they weren’t thinking about legacy. They were thinking about the meeting next week. The tutoring session on Thursday. The student who needed a recommendation letter by Friday. They showed up, and then they showed up again, and eventually someone realized they’d been showing up for long enough that it deserved a name. In 1951, it became Michigan Epsilon and SEMIAC is celebrating with MI-E this huge milestone.
Seventy-five years later, the work looks different but the principle hasn’t changed.
This month, SEMIAC members showed up to two Science Olympiad invitationals — spending full days on their feet so that hundreds of students could compete. On a Tuesday evening, members showed up for the final Engineering Futures session. On Pi Day, members from multiple chapters showed up to the same room for no reason other than 3.14. And on a Saturday, the chapter held its election — every person on that ballot had already been showing up for months before anyone asked them to lead.
Leadership in SEMIAC isn’t a promotion. It’s a recognition of what someone was already doing.
Building Bridges, Not Just Buildings
We are trained to build things. Engines, circuits, structures, systems. But the most important things SEMIAC has built over seventy-five years aren’t physical. They’re invisible. They’re the connections between people.
This month, District 7 launched tbp-d7.org — connecting chapters across Michigan and Ohio. A new Matrix chat server went live for cross-chapter communication. On Pi Day, it wasn’t just SEMIAC in the room — it was an inter-chapter event, members from different schools and graduation years sharing pie and conversation. That doesn’t happen because of an org chart. It happens because someone built a bridge.
Even our technology reflects this. The calendar sync on semiac.org lets you subscribe from any device and get automatic updates. It’s a small feature, but what it really does is lower the barrier between “I didn’t know about it” and “I’ll be there.” That’s a bridge. The game room on tbpmie.org gives members a reason to interact outside of meetings. A casual bridge. Science Olympiad puts a Tau Beta Pi member in front of a student who might one day become one. A generational bridge.
Engineers build things that carry loads across gaps. That’s literally what a bridge is. And this chapter has been building them for seventy-five years.
The Quiet Engine
This is the quiet engine of an alumni chapter. There’s no employer requiring attendance. No GPA incentive. No performance review. The only reason any of this happens is because individual people — with careers and families and commutes — decide that this community is worth their Tuesday night. Their Saturday morning. Their pie.
So if you showed up this month — to a meeting, to an event, to a Zoom call, to a vote — thank you. You are the reason this chapter exists.
And if you haven’t shown up in a while, the door is open. There’s always a committee that could use one more voice, an event that could use one more volunteer, a student who could use one more mentor. You don’t need an invitation. You just need to show up.
We’ve been doing this for seventy-five years. Building bridges. Showing up. Here’s to seventy-five more.
— The SEMIAC Newsletter Team
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Warm regards,
Apoorv Talekar, Ph.D.
Webmaster and Media Coordinator, SEMIAC
Chief advisor, Mi-E
[email protected]
Comments
4 responses to “SEMIAC April 2026 Newsletter”
I really enjoyed this content and some new sections introduced here! My only nitpick is the flipping page layout – I hope we can return to the classic pdf style for the distribution.
Perhaps we could separate the newsletter from the other blog posts? A page dedicated to our current edition and another with the option to recover and download old editions as well!
The MI-E is working to archive their newsletters, so why don’t we get started on ours?
The Blog post is a default WordPress format, there are several sections under the blog posts, one of them is a Newsletter. See the tag under the main heading of the post. I will try to make it more apparent next time. Thanks for your input.
For emailed newsletter we will have a plain html and pdf style. This format is only for the website.