January Executive Committee Meeting

The first EXCOM meeting of the year will be held on Monday. Traditionally this has been the one meeting each year when all the Technical Chapter Chairs are invited to share their successes and challenges with the ECOM committee. A common theme over the years has been the difficulty of finding volunteers to help with organizing chapter meetings. This year we have invited a number of new volunteers to the meeting in the hope that we can match up the interests of the volunteers with the needs of the Section and the Chapters.

We will know soon enough whether this idea is successful or not.

I am planning to give an overview of the IEEE organization at the National/International level and then describe some of the volunteer opportunities in the Section. Bruce Hecht will describe the Lecture Series opportunities and then we will break for a buffet meal during which there will be ample opportunity for new volunteers to talk to Chapter chairs about their interests and the chapter needs.

I have great hopes for this format producing some motivated volunteers and satisfied Chapter Chairs.

TePRA Steering Committee Meeting

The next Steering Committee meeting for the robotics conference, Technologies for Practical Robotics Applications, TePRA, will be held at 6:30pm at Textron Defense Systems in Wilmington, MA.

New faces are always welcome so if you would like to come along and learn about what we are doing just sign up on the website www.time2meet.com/ieee-textron/ so we know how much pizza to order.

Boston Chapter PES Rejuvination Meeting

The Boston Chapter of the PES (Power & Energy Society) is seeking volunteers to support the efforts of the Chapter to provide Boston Area PES members quality programs to enhance their professional, career and personal goals and needs.

The Chapter has a number of volunteer positions available for IEEE members who would like to actively participate in setting the short, medium and long range goals for the Chapter. There are currently openings in many facets of the Chapter, from committee membership involvement to Executive Committee positions.

Please join Ron Tabroff on Tuesday January 20, 2009 from 6:30-8:30PM for a kickoff meeting to discuss how we can become the premiere organization on power and energy information and education in the Boston Area. The meeting will be held at the Garden Room which is on the 5th floor of the National Grid facility at 201 Jones Road in Waltham, MA.

For additional information please call Ron Tabroff at 978-535-2815.

Lecture Series

The Boston Section has been putting on Spring and Fall semesters of short courses for many years. This lecture series has been very successful providing a very valuable resource to our members. In recent years the attendance at these courses has been dwindling and many have to cancelled.

We have tried changing the format, content and price of the courses but nothing seems to work. The demand for these course just doesn't seem to be there any more.

Any thoughts and suggestions on this topic would be welcome.

Engineers Week Career Fair

Mark your calendars.

Boston Engineers Week Career Fair
Hyatt Regency Boston Hotel
Thursday, February 12, 2009
3:00PM - 7:00PM

Corporate Tables: $600
Please suggest to your company that they participate in the Career Fair on Thursday or attend the luncheon on Friday.

Career Fair Free for Student Attendees(and Engineers)

For more information www.engineers.org/engwk.html
or
email econrad@systems.textron.com

Volunteers
We do need a few volunteers to staff the IEEE table and to talk to students about engineering as they attend the Career Fair. If you are available on Thursday February 12th anytime between 2pm and 7pm or Friday February 13th between 11am and 2pm please send me an e-mail john.conrad@ieee.org

Montreal: Our IEEE Sister Section

We recently signed an agreement with the Montreal Section to become sister sections for the next three years. This is an opportunity to develop a relationship with another IEEE Section of a similar size and composition. According to their website they have twenty five technical chapters and six student branches.

The Montreal website is http://ewh.ieee.org/r7/montreal/

We have already received a request for some assistance with providing some contact information at some of Boston's colleges and universities. The Montreal Student Branch at Sherbrooke University has started to plan a one-day trip to Boston in May 2009 and hope to visit a number of schools while they are in town.

In the words of Laurent Lamarre, the 2009 Section Chair, in a recent email to me he said "IEEE Sherbrooke(Student Branch) is interested in visiting some of your most prestigious universities. Our preliminary plan is to go to Boston on May 2th in bus, spend the whole day visiting universities, laboratories and/or industrial organisations and to come back in Sherbrooke during the night. It should be very easy to find interested people for this activity but we plan to limit the number of places in order to fit in one bus.

I would really appreciate if you could help study the feasibility of the project. For now, my main concerns are about the access clearance we need to visit the universities and the possibility to visit laboratories/industrial organisation during the weekend.

Our first idea was to concentrate our efforts on the MIT and Harvard but I would appreciate if you could give us suggestions on which university/labs/companies to visit."

Obviously I will be respondeing to Laurent and offering help on bealf of the Boston Section memebrs.

IEEE-USA Annual Meeting, Salt Lake City

I have just made my first decision as Section Chair. I decided to approve Rob Vice's request to attend the IEEE USA Annual Meeting in Utah on February 26th. Rob is the Pace Activities Chair for the Section. The theme of the meeting is Alternative Energy which seems to be on everyone's mind at the moment.