General Information

What is Eta Kappa Nu?

Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) is the International Honor Society for Electrical Engineers. Outstanding persons are elected to HKN primarily from the junior and senior classes of accredited undergraduate programs. Graduate students and distinguished professional engineers are also eligible. Eligibility depends on marked ability as evidenced by scholarship, personal character, useful voluntary services, and distinguished accomplishments, all of which indicate that the candidate will be, or is, a success in his profession.

HKN is organized into college chapters, eta-branches, and alumni chapters overseen by a board of directors with a national executive council consisting of president, vice-president, and secretary. The national headquarters is at University of Missouri at Rolla.

Beyond membership qualification, which in itself encourages and gives recognition to high scholarship and other significant achievements, HKN recognizes outstanding achievement in electrical engineering by presenting the following awards:

Outstanding Electrical Engineering Junior
Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer
Outstanding Electrical Engineering Professor
Eminent Membership
Outstanding Chapter

In addition to recognizing achievement, another aim of the organization is to assist its members throughout their lives in becoming better professionals as well as better citizens. The membership of HKN, thus embodies a constructive force to improve the standards of the profession, the courses of instruction, and the institutions where its chapters are established.

Services and Activities

HKN is more than an Honor Society. In addition to bestowing honor on deserving people, it is dedicated to serve the Electrical Engineering profession and society. HKN renders its service by means of local and national activities. Examples of some time-tested activities carried out by college chapters of HKN include

Presentation of local awards
Tutoring services
Fund raising and scholarships
Career guidance
Sponsorship of engineering and career days
Sponsorship of colloquia
Community activities
Social activities

Many alumni actively contribute to the aim and purposes of HKN throughout life. Some of their voluntary contributions include: serving as officers or on committees of local alumni chapters and the international organization; participating in joint and regional meetings of alumni and college chapters; and promoting the ideals of HKN throughout the electrical engineering profession.

History

(Adapted from the essay ``From the Shade of a Cottonwood Tree: The Early Days of HKN'' by Alton Zerby)
On September 25, 1904, in a shady spot under a large cottonwood tree in the middle of an Agriculture Department field off the main campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana, Maurice L. Carr along with four classmates began forming a collegiate society of electrical engineering students. The initial purpose of this nascent society was one of employment -- a professional union. Within just a few years, however, a shift in that purpose changed HKN to an honor society with membership qualifications predicated primarily upon a collective favorable judgment of individual candidates, and on the likelihood of their eventual success in the engineering field.

Scholastic standards observed soon after the founding of HKN were memorialized in a mild statement written into the Constitution during the Convention of 1913. This set definite numerical limits to the proportion of each EE class that could be elected and required that the by-laws of each chapter must specify definite scholarship standards subject to approval by the National Executive Council. In general, these standards were specified in grade points. Then, during the latter part of the 1930's, the national officers recommended that each college chapter set the upper fourth of the junior EE class as eligible for membership. This was not made mandatory until 1947, when the requirement of such rating was written into the Constitution at the recommendation of the Association of College Honor Societies, of which HKN had become a member.

Today, there are over 175 college chapters, many alumni chapters, and 200,000 members worldwide. HKN continues to grow and to influence the progress of the electrical engineering profession through the high ideals of scholarship, character, and service.

Sites to See

The National headquarters at the University of Missouri at Rolla.
The Delta Omega Chapter of HKN at the University of Hawaii Chapter maintains a complete list of active HKN chapters and branches.

Maintained by hkn-webpage@wpi.edu
Last modified: Apr 12, 2006, 17:35 EDT