The ACM and IEEE are the two leading professional organizations for computation, computer science and engineering, and information technology in the world.
They support thriving student chapters at thousands of universities and colleges world wide and are largely student-organized. They host mentoring and social events for students, regular meetings, annual programming competitions, invite guest and technical speakers, invite alumni panels, give resume peer feedback and practice interview questions with each other, apply for funding for group trips to conferences.
Evergreen does not currently have an ACM/IEEE chapter, although it has had one in the past (in fact, a very strong ACM-W chapter, which is one led by women).
Evergreen currently has a computer club, which *could* become or help with an ACM/IEEE chapter.
An ACM/IEEE chapter currently needs 4 or 5 tenure track computer science faculty to be ACM/IEEE members themselves to sponsor, and many local area colleges do not have enough enrollment to support this requirement (Evergreen, South Puget Sound Community College, St. Martin's University, Centralia, Cloverfield Technical College, UW Tacoma, Puget Sound University). We have received special permission from ACM/IEEE to form a *cross-college* South Puget Sound Chapter.
There is strong support from Paul Pham at Evergreen State College and Radana Dvorak at St. Martin's University for this initiative who agree to be initial faculty sponsors and members. We suggest that it should be a Washington 501(c)(3) non-profit with a board of directors that includes a majority of current students, parents of prospective students, alumni, industry sponsors, and government / service organizations.