Help your career — be active in ASME

I recently returned from the 2001 ASME Technology Executives Conference (TEC) last month in Atlanta, sponsored by the Council on Engineering.

During that short weekend there, I learned more about ASME and how it operates than I had in my previous five years of being in a national position for another council. If you want to know more about ASME, how it works, and how it can help your engineering career, this is one meeting you should attend.

Going to this meeting also brought to light another important aspect of ASME that the entrepreneurial engineer should consider as a key to success. To make contact with the correct people, you need to: network, network, network.

As an international professional society, ASME is one of the best vehicles that a mechanical engineer, or any other engineer, has to actually accomplish this objective.

Where else can you have access to 125,000 members worldwide with expertise in a myriad of technical disciplines for pennies a day? If you are not already active in your section, become active. If you are not active in the divisions you sign up for every year, become active. At some point, your career or company may depend on the contacts you have made.

I know it has helped me in the last eight years since I became active, first in my section, then at the national level, where I served on the Committee on Member Interest as ASME's representative to the Engineering Workforce Commission of the American Association of Engineering Societies and now the Management Division.

During TEC weekend, I was asked to make a presentation for a university class on the work I am doing, participate in writing a chapter of a book, and met several new individuals to work with on the Committee for Engineering Entrepreneurship. I know of no other place where you can make this type of impact, except at an ASME conference.

I realize that many of you are asking yourself, how do I get the time off from work to attend? Where do I get the money to pay for this adventure, or what if my boss will not let me go? In reality, you should turn all these questions around. How can you advance your career by not participating in your professional society fully and completely? The truth is that your career does depend on it.

Now, a couple of corrections:

In last month's column, I announced that a guest writer was preparing a series of articles for the Entrepreneurial Exchange about patenting that would start this month. Unfortunately, those articles have been delayed for a few months.

In the January column, I mentioned that engineers should look at designing an election system at the six-sigma level.

However, Richard Symonds and others pointed out that this would result in 3.4 errors per million votes, or only slightly better than what occurred in Florida. In reality, the level of accuracy needs to be much better, in the range of nine or 12 sigma, as is being done in the computer industry. That's doable, but still a much greater challenge.

— Niel Leon
Committee on Engineering
Entrepreneurship
leonn@asme.org

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