🎤 Member Spotlight: Valerie Kulesh
Michigan Epsilon · Social Coordinator · SEMIAC Newsletter Interview, March 2026
This month we sat down with Valerie Kulesh, Michigan Epsilon’s Social Coordinator, to talk about her experience in Tau Beta Pi, the D7 conference in Cleveland, and her unique path combining electrical engineering with theatrical arts.
When did you join TBP?
I initiated at Michigan Epsilon this past semester in the fall.
What are three things you’ve learned as a TBP member?
Michigan Epsilon has really showed me the value of having a community of engineers. Engineering, and really any pursuit of education or training, requires a ton of support between yourself and the people around you, and everyone in TBP is truly dedicated to helping the organization and surrounding campus community.
TBP has also brought a lot of volunteering opportunities back into my life. Events like MindSET and the Greening of Detroit have been so gratifying to participate in.
And connecting with people in other disciplines has been great. I’m focused on electrical and computer engineering and theatrical art, and TBP events have allowed me to connect with students in biomedical, computer science, mechanical, and pretty much every engineering field.
Tell us about the D7 Conference in Cleveland
Myself, Maryam, Bayaan, Salem, and MD left Detroit on Friday evening and arrived at the social hour pretty late. We had time to catch up with other members that we had met at inter-chapter Pi Day, and then with our district director Michael at the hotel.
The conference started early Saturday morning with presentations from Ohio Alpha and the VP of the executive council. It was great to hear about HQ’s progress and plans for the year. The events throughout the day were a great way to network and meet other chapters — info about Engineering Futures, MindSET events, the NEST design competition, chapter reporting, and plenty more.
Everyone had a ton of fun doing TBP-themed sketch comedy and trivia with other chapter members. My teams may not have won the competitions, but we certainly made some new friends!
The last big moment was choosing Michigan Theta to host the next district conference. I’m especially excited to see Michigan Theta’s growth — they’ve put in a ton of work to increase the presence of their chapter this year.
A little about Valerie
I’m lucky enough to be pursuing a BFA in theatre design and technology alongside my engineering degree. I’m looking toward a career in theatrical engineering with scenic automation and robotic puppetry.
Over the last two semesters I spent a ton of time working on The Play That Goes Wrong — a British slapstick comedy about engineering students who put on a terrible show. There were a ton of physical gags in the set that allowed me to learn about mechanical scenic design, automation cue programming, and MIG welding.
Currently, I’m working on The SpongeBob Musical as the properties designer and engineer. We just had our opening weekend, and we’re running through April 4. Members of Michigan Epsilon will be attending the closing performance at 7:30 on Saturday — please reach out if you’d like to join!
🎭 Come see the show! Closing night: Saturday, April 4 at 7:30 PM
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.