Engineering students Joel Voogt, Jeff Guerrero, Mike Spee and Corinne Kluge are designing drinking water and wastewater management solutions in Cajabamba, Ecuador. In the future, senior design projects like theirs will be eligible for endowment fund grants.

Raising more than $25,000 in just a few weeks, a group of young engineering alumni has launched a new fund to support engineering research at Calvin.

An appeal for annual contributions from engineering professor Steve VanderLeest prompted the support from alumni.

“I thought, wouldn’t it be neat if the department didn’t have to ask for this money each year?” says Keith Mulder '04, an alumnus involved in the early stages of the fund. “How can we best equip Calvin engineering students for the long term?”

The answer was to set up the Engineering Department Endowment Fund, in which money donated will be invested by the college, and then the income from the fund will be used by engineering students and faculty each year. “I was delighted to learn that some of our recent graduates took the initiative to start this endowment … and I’m very grateful that they have the desire to give back so that our engineering program can continue to flourish,” says VanderLeest.

Calvin College is one of the few Christian colleges and universities to offer an ABET-accredited engineering program, and the college graduates more than 60 students each year with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (B.S.E.) degree. Graduates from the class of 2007 enjoy a 100-percent placement rate less than six months after graduation, and the department has a special interest in promoting sustainability projects.

Since graduation, the 2004 electrical engineering concentrators have stayed in touch via an email listserv, and it was through this email exchange that the idea for a special engineering endowment first took hold.

“I remember Jordan Hoogendam, who worked on the photovoltaic roof for the Bunker Interpretative Center, struggling to find funding for his project,” says Mulder. “We thought, wouldn’t it be great if the department could provide special funding for kids who have the passion for a high-impact project, and have a good business plan to go with it?”

At first, says Mulder, some engineering alumni were skeptical. “They wondered if we were serious, if we could do it, how it would work.”

But the idea gained momentum, and soon the fund totaled $25,000 — mostly in the form of small donations.

“This is really everybody’s fund,” emphasizes Mulder. “It doesn’t belong to any individual donor, nor does it belong to the 2004 electrical engineering class, or to engineering alumni in general. We want to get donations from anyone who believes in the project and thinks it’s worthwhile.”

In fact, the fund guidelines stipulate that the name of the endowment cannot change from “The Engineering Department Endowment Fund,” and may never take on the name of any one donor at any time.

“Small contributions together will produce great things,” says Mulder. “We’re just getting started.”