> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.latinoprofessionalsmagazine.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Future Is Now: SHPE's Historic Gathering of Hispanic STEM Talent - URL: https://www.latinoprofessionalsmagazine.com/the-future-is-now-shpes-historic-gathering-of-hispanic-stem-talent/ - Published: 2026-07-08T22:26:54.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-06T17:53:30.000Z - Description: In Salt Lake City, more than twelve thousand students turned a convention floor into one of the country's most consequential meeting points between Hispanic engineering talent and the companies that need it. As SHPE approaches fifty years, the record - Author: Rafael Magaña - Tags: Culture, Community In Salt Lake City this fall, the convention floor filled with more than twelve thousand students, each one carrying a résumé, a portfolio, and the plain conviction that engineering has room for them. The [Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers](https://shpe.org/?ref=latinoprofessionalsmagazine.com) said its [National Convention](https://shpenationalconvention.shpe.org/?ref=latinoprofessionalsmagazine.com) broke records this year, both in the size of the crowd and in the number of corporate partners who showed up alongside it. Both numbers matter, and they matter together. The corporate presence was not incidental. Companies do not send recruiters and executives to a four-day convention out of goodwill alone. They come because the talent gathered there is talent they will need to hire, promote, and retain in the years ahead. The convention has become a place where capital and career meet, an arrangement that only holds up if the students leave with more than a handshake: mentorship, a job offer, a network they can still call on a decade from now. The Gala, held on the convention's final night, was where that arrangement took its public and ceremonial form. Interim CEO [Miguel Alemañy](https://shpe.org/ctshowcase-team-member/miguel-alemany/?ref=latinoprofessionalsmagazine.com) addressed the room, and the leaders who followed him, Will Davis, Melanie Weber, and Natalie Davila-Rendon, spoke to what the organization has built and where it means to take it next. Board members were recognized among the crowd, including Fernando Paz, MBA, one of the volunteers whose long service has kept SHPE's chapters running in cities most conventions never think to mention. None of this arrived by accident. SHPE was [founded in 1974](https://shpe.org/about-shpe/the-story-of-shpe/?ref=latinoprofessionalsmagazine.com), and next year the organization turns fifty. Fifty years is long enough to grow from a founding organization into a national network of chapters that now draws thousands of students across the country each year, and long enough to move from a niche concern in American engineering to a fixture on the recruiting calendars of the corporations that filled Salt Lake City's halls. The anniversary gives this convention its full weight. It is not a single good year. It is a marker on a five-decade climb. That climb has always required more than students willing to show up. It has required people willing to fund it, through corporate sponsorship, through mentorship, through gifts written into a will. As SHPE approaches its 50th anniversary in 2024, the organization has asked for exactly that kind of support, directing anyone interested in a major or planned gift to Yajaira De La Paz, who leads the effort. It is not a subtle ask, and there is no reason it should be. An organization that has spent fifty years building pathways into engineering for Hispanic students and professionals is asking, plainly, to keep building them for another fifty. What happened in Salt Lake City was not simply a networking event with a large number of engineers in the room. It was a demonstration of what happens when comunidad and capital move in the same direction at once: students get in the door, companies get the workforce they say they need, and an organization on the edge of its fiftieth year gets a running start into whatever comes after it. --- ### Event Host The [**Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE)**](https://shpe.org/?ref=latinoprofessionalsmagazine.com), the nation's largest organization advancing Hispanics in STEM, hosted its National Convention, which drew close to 12,000 attendees to Salt Lake City, Utah, November 1–5, 2023. --- Reported and written by **Rafael Magaña**, Founder & Publisher, for *Latino Professionals Magazine*. [→ Full archive](https://www.latinoprofessionalsmagazine.com/author/rafael-magana/) **RECORD №00121 · MMXXVI · Latino Professionals Magazine** Published by Latino Professionals Media Group. Documenting the people, ideas, and institutions shaping American business.