Hey Guys, The following are a few answers to your questions that were raised in a few of your emails. >What does the Paper Conference usually include? In other words, would >the final writeups of the senior class (due to teachers somewhere in >april and may) qualify? Toward the end of each Spring semester (this year's was on April 27-28), IEEE Region 2 has a student leadership conference at a different host university. As a part of this conference, there is a paper contest to which any ECE student can submit a technical paper and must present it. Dr. Singh strongly encourages, at the every least, that the senior members of the executive board submit their senior project papers. The following blurb comes from the contest rules: "The IEEE Student Prize Paper Contest offers the undergraduate IEEE Student member opportunities to exercise and improve both written and verbal communication skills. Throughout an engineer¹s career, he will be constantly called upon to communicate ideas to others. Researching, writing, and presenting a paper provides a Student with invaluable early experience in expressing ideas related to engineering. Since the paper contest¹s primary function is to improve the engineering student¹s communicative skills, no Student should be discouraged from entering the contest due to a false requirement of technical sophistication." More information can be found at: http://www.ewh.ieee.org/reg/2/r2sac/papercontestrules2002.htm >I do not understand the idea of a book of evidence... Just a >scrapbook? A book of evidence can be thought of as a professional scrapbook, yes. It includes pictures, journal-type entries, summaries, articles, and anything relating to that which our branch participates in. The purpose of such a compilation is three-fold. The first objective is to give ourselves a good way to evaluate our own progress by looking back on what we have accomplished. The second is to provide (through the online version) a lure for new recruits as they get to see what sort of events we participate in. Lastly, it gives future generations of the IEEE @ VU a good foundation for their activities in addition to serving as a benchmark. >I am not sure if a capped subsidy is the best way to >do it. (I'm not totally against it, I am just curious where the idea >came from.) I just realized that the proposal made it seem like the membership subsidy is my main tool for gaining new recruits. This is not the case. Rather, we will rely on the enthusiasm of each of our members and elected leaders in addition to specific efforts outlined in Evan's plan to be the main force of our recruiting effort. The idea of a membership subsidy is a "call to action". After Evan gives a presentation to a sophomore class, some people may be interested, but most won't run home to IEEE.org to signup. However, if Evan can offer a 50% or 100% membership subsidy to the first 20 or 10 people that signup, there is suddenly a reason for people to jump for the opportunity. >I would also bring up some issues with the budget but I am >sure Dr Singh will handle it. I talked to Dr. Singh the same day that the proposal was written and discussed the budget. I will outline some of the fruits of that discussion in another email on "things to do". >But about the Career day, I thought I remember one of the local >branches talking about an event where they have people come in from >local companies and talk about what is done in their area of work, and >what the future of their line of work looks like. Because I do know >that a lot of people go into electrical engineering or computer >engineering, and they don't realize that its a really diverse field, so >it might be nice to see what is out there. I thought Drexel did >something like that, and even if they didn't, does this sound like a >plausible idea? This was raised by Deep... I think it's a great idea. We should maybe look for a panel of 4-5 local people to give 5-10 min talk each. I may have some contacts through Dr. Singh... anyone else know anyone? Pirone, anyone from NSWC? I also know that Dr. Dwyer, a new CPE prof, just came from industry. Also, the new Dean of Engineering was the CTO of Honeywell. Any volunteers to take charge of this event? That's that for now... more coming shortly. Sean