Lehigh Valley WIE Planning Meeting

#Lehigh #Valley #WIE #Planning

This is a planning meeting for the Lehigh Valley WIE Affinity Group. Interested Lehigh Valley Section WIE members are welcome to attend.

Please register for the event; on the day of the event, the webex link will be sent to all registered members.

Minutes of Meeting:

• Angelique Irvin’s talk, November 10 at 7pm: Bonnie will contact Angelique on LinkedIn to ask her to provide a title and abstract for the talk. Lifang has reserved room Packard 466 at Lehigh University.
• Robert Tench’s talk, September 22: Lifang reports that 17 people attended virtually, and 5 in person. Great turnout! The talk was well received; Robert gave a great insight into fiber optical amplifiers and lasers. Robert will offer an internship position at Cybel; he will email us with the requirements.
• Wilkes Engineering Restructuring: Carole’s role has changed; she is now (simultaneously) the Associate Dean of the College of Business and Engineering and also the interim Chairperson of the Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. There was no downsizing of the Engineering programs. The engineering programs are now housed in the newly formed College of Business and Engineering. There are 5 engineering programs (Civil, Environmental, Electrical, Mechanical and Engineering Management).
• Morton Contest, April 14, 2023: The contest is open to any undergraduate student who is an IEEE student member, in good standing, at Lafayette College, Lehigh University, University of Scranton, and Wilkes University, and has been selected to represent their Student Branch.
• Increasing Group membership: Bonnie asked for a list of the names of women members of the Section. Chris generated the list for Bonnie; it lists about 80 women, but some are in arrears.
• Ideas for activities:

  1. Ice-cream social to be held at a college (TBD). Tentatively date of April, with invites sent out in February. Possible topic: LinkedIn tutorial
  2. Talk on how to start an Engineering Consulting business. Robert Peruzzi as possible speaker?
  3. Happy hour before technical talks.
  4. IEEE volunteering at SRI.

• PDH hours: future technical talks should be advertised as a Professional Development Hour, if applicable. Talks should also be offered in Hybrid format and recorded, so that they can be posted on IEEE-tv or YouTube.
• Elections: Rules for Affinity Group elections are in the MGA Manual https://mga.ieee.org/board-committees/operations-manual, page 113 (D6). The Section appears to hold elections every 2 years, with the new elected officers starting in January 2024; we should follow the same timeline. Normally, one person should not have the same position for more than 4 consecutive years. We should talk about this at the November meeting.
• Past activities, Carole’s promotion, and Chris’s Grace Hopper conference should be listed on the website.
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