SWEET Squad

What is SWEET Squad

  • Have you ever worked in a dysfunctional group project?
  • Have you ever seen one of your peers experience a microaggression?
  • Do you want WPI to be a welcoming and inclusive experience for all students?

The SWEET Squad is a network of students, faculty, and staff trained to provide support and guidance to team members, as well as to those advising teams, in curricular and co-curricular settings. The SWEET Squad is a campus-wide effort to help support
teams experiencing challenges. Participants in SWEET Squad participate in a 6-week experience to better understand their own identities, explore the experiences of students when working in teams, and gain tools to help participants and their peers work
more effectively and equitably.  

Why is it Beneficial?

Participants gain access to tools, learn about their own identities in a group setting, and have a great experience to talk about with future employers. Most importantly, they can then use these hands on tools in their future
groups to help to make WPI a better place to be a student.  

How to Participate

If you’re interested in participating, email the SWEET Squad: sweetsquad@wpi.edu to find out about the next offering
of the SWEET Squad training.

“I think it really– at least personally, it really opened my eyes to a lot of issues that I haven’t really had to spend much time thinking about before… So this training really helped me…become more aware of the people around me that I work with.”

“I actually found the group discussions to be the most beneficial part of the whole thing, just a place to sit down and talk about stuff like personal identity and social identity…. We don’t really get those safe places in a school environment to just
sit down and talk about our opinions and form our opinions and get to hear people’s thoughts on these things.”

“…in my software engineering class last term, that was easily one of the best groups I’ve ever worked in on a project. And one of the first things we did in our first couple meetings was asset mapping and figuring out what people are good at…That was
easily one of the best, if not the best, groups I’ve ever worked with on a project. So I can say from that experience and from the experience here that those activities really do help a lot for organizing, figuring out what roles people can really
excel in so that you can really get work done a lot more efficiently.”