The University of Utah GradSWE group was founded to bridge the wide gap between their highly successful undergraduate SWE section and the underserved graduate community. This was an especially vital move for their section as the pandemic forced all student interaction off campus and into a new virtual format, leaving many new and current graduate students feeling isolated, disoriented, and unsure about their goals and studies. They hosted regular virtual socials open to all graduate and interested undergraduate students to facilitate connection during this challenging time. These socials provided a venue for graduate students to play online games, share their favorite recipes, talk about GradSWE’s trajectory, watch inspiring movies, listen to podcasts, do yoga, and more. These socials introduced new members to our group and served to strengthen existing bonds in their community, both of which enrich GradSWE as we continue to grow. Alongside our socials, we established a professional development and mentorship panel series to meet the vital need for guidance and advice in our community. Their core leadership members spent the fall semester gathering input and feedback from students, faculty, and postdocs regarding mentoring needs of the community and distilling down all feedback into actionable items that we address currently in our spring talk series. Topics include coping with COVID, effective communication, transitioning to industry, funding in graduate school, and technical reading, writing, and publishing. Thus far, our panelists have included psychologists, career counselors, professors, and industry engineers, among others. We send a biweekly GradSWE newsletter to communicate information about our events and relevant outside resources to our community and provide support to each other with virtual care packages during finals week. To ensure that GradSWE at the University of Utah builds a robust and lasting presence, we designed stickers and T-shirts and have distributed these at no cost to encourage participation and engagement.