Engineering
is easier when
someone's been
there before.
MentorSEAS is a student-run mentorship community inside UCLA Samueli — a quiet, careful pairing of upperclassmen with the Bruins coming up behind them. No corporate ladder. No five-year plan. Just someone who's been there, an hour a week, and a door that doesn't close.
- Pairs
- 142
- Mentors
- 68
- Majors
- 11
What we
actually are
Mentorship that doesn't feel institutional.
The hardest part of UCLA Engineering isn't the math, or even the late nights — it's the moment, somewhere in your first quarter, when you're sitting in a lecture hall of three hundred people and quietly wondering if everyone else got a manual you didn't. We started MentorSEAS because we remember that feeling. And because the answer to it, almost always, was a junior or senior who took fifteen minutes to explain something a professor had ten seconds for.
The mentorship
experience
A four-step joining,
told slowly.
Tell us who you are.
Five quiet questions, the kind you might actually want to answer. What you're studying, what you're stuck on, what you'd want from someone a year ahead.
Application — 6 minutes
We pair you, by hand.
Not an algorithm. Two of our coordinators read your application, compare it against our mentors, and pick the one who feels right. We get it wrong sometimes — and we re-pair, no questions asked.
About a week of careful reading
Coffee, then a conversation.
Your first meeting is on us. After that — a midterm review, a problem set debrief, a question about a research lab, an honest answer about which professors are kind. Whatever you need.
Free coffee, indefinite ratio
Find the people behind the people.
Your mentor knows their friends, who know clubs, who know labs, who know labs that are hiring. Quietly, the campus stops feeling like a brochure and starts feeling like a place you live.
By spring, you'll have a study group
A scrapbook
from the year
Photographs we keep
on the fridge.
Every quarter we ask our mentors to hand in a photo. Some are from the labs. Some are from the long walk to Engineering VI. Most are blurry. We're fine with that.
A reading list of
engineering orgs
Thirty-six rooms,
one of them yours.
UCLA Engineering has more student organizations than orientation has time for. Here's a hand-picked, opinionated start — ordered by how warmly they greet a freshman who walks in late.
- 01Bruin RacingBuildTues · Engineering IV Shop1987
Five teams, one shop. Formula, Baja, supermileage, rocketry, and a quiet electric-vehicle group nobody can shut up about.
- 02ACM at UCLABuildWed · Engineering VI 2891969
The umbrella for everything CS. Hack, AI, Cyber, Studio, Teach LA, ICPC — pick the room that already feels like home.
- 03IEEEBuildMon · Engineering IV 171968
Soldering nights, MicroMouse, the always-running PCB workshop. Where hardware people find each other.
- 04Society of Women EngineersIdentityThurs · Boelter 47601971
A long, careful network of women in engineering — the kind of place where “you’ll figure it out” is not the answer to anything.
- 05NSBEIdentityTues · Engineering VI 1051976
National Society of Black Engineers, UCLA chapter. Mentorship, conventions, and a whiteboard that holds the year together.
- 06SHPEIdentityWed · Boelter 34001979
Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers — first-gen energy, professional dev, and a Día de los Muertos potluck that shouldn’t be missed.
- 07Rocket ProjectCompeteSat · Engineering IV Roof Lab2003
Liquid rocketry built by undergraduates. We launch in the Mojave; we learn in the parking lot.
- 08Bruin AIResearchFri · Math Sciences 66272017
Reading group, project tracks, and a steadfast refusal to put “AI” in the name of every demo.
- 09UCLA Bioengineering SocietyResearchTues · Engineering V 51211995
Pre-med-adjacent, lab-tour-rich, and the only org with a working bread-mold bioreactor in a windowsill.
- 10Theta TauIndustrySun · Engineering VI 2001907
Co-ed professional engineering fraternity. Fewer rituals than you’d expect; more career fairs than you’d think.
Welcomes beginners — no prior experience expected.
See all 36 organizationsIn their
own words
The advice that
actually stuck.
I asked my mentor what to do when I bombed my first midterm. She said, ‘call me, then your mom, in that order.’
Nobody told me Engineering was a building, a community, a habit, and an identity — all at once. My mentor did.
Half of mentorship is technical advice. The other half is somebody saying, out loud, ‘you’re not behind.’
I came in thinking I’d found my people. I’d found my major. The people came after, and they came from MentorSEAS.
A note before you go
The best advice usually comes
from someone who was in your shoes
a year ago.
Applications take six minutes. Pairings take a week. Whether you show up ready, terrified, or somewhere in between — there's already someone here, waiting to say “yeah, same.”