Are SPACs effective? SPACs can be effective in increasing professional awareness and interest in branch activities, but branch officers have to maintain the momentum

The IEEE's goals in supporting Student Professional Awareness Conferences is to help the academic community address the ethical, social, and economic issues that affect the profession of engineering, thereby increasing professional awareness among electrical engineering students. Student Branches that sponsor SPACs have secondary, but also important, goals: to increase membership and participation in Branch activities and to improve campuswide awareness of the IEEE. To what extent is the SPAC program succeeding? After evaluating three SPACs held in the fall of 1983 at Vanderbilt University, Nashville; Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville; and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, we have concluded that SPACs can be very effective in meeting some of these goals, but only if a Branch is already dynamic and well organized.