New leadership opportunity for early career engineers

Mary James Legatski
Center for Leadership & Diversity

The ECLIPSE (Early Career Leadership Intern Program to Serve Engineering) initiative is a new leadership development opportunity for ASME members who have served in the workforce for three to 10 years since receiving their engineering degrees.

The goal of ECLIPSE, which launched at the 2006 ASME Summer Annual Meeting, is to engage, identify and begin to develop potential leaders for ASME by placing early career engineers in highly visible and productive roles within the ASME organization.

"We have taken the best aspects from the former Leadership Development Initiative (LDI) and Minority Leadership Program (MLP) programs and folded them into the new ECLIPSE activity," said Larry Dickinson, co-chair of the Center for Leadership and Diversity's Committee in Internship Programs. "This new program will actively seek out and engage early career engineers and provide them with an exceptional personal growth and leadership development opportunity."

Fellow co-chair Karma Snyder added, "Early career engineers will enjoy a visible and tangible high-level presence in the Society, and graduates of the program will gain skills and experience to help advance both their ASME endeavors and their professional careers."

ECLIPSE is a competitive internship program. The application deadline is January 15. ECLIPSE participants are matched with a specific ASME unit for a period of one year, and work closely with an assigned mentor to complete one or more projects throughout the year. The 2006-07 ECLIPSE participants are Jill Anderson and Lauren Rathmann.

Anderson described her experience in these words: "I am the intern to the Board of Governors, and it has been a great education to experience firsthand the discussion and motivations behind the decisions made by Society leadership."

Rathmann noted, "Under the Center for Leadership and Diversity, I have been paired with a mentor whom I will be assisting in gathering diversity metrics and then preparing a report on the results. After discovering we both have a passion for diversity in engineering, we are planning to co-author a paper on diversity in engineering education and the workplace."

Participation in ECLIPSE has also raised Rathmann's visibility within her own ASME section. "The ECLIPSE internship has been a springboard for getting involved in the Skokie Valley Subsection, where I now chair its committee on education."

"Through ECLIPSE, the Society now has another means to focus on the important membership demographic known as the early career engineer," Dickinson said. "By combining 'opportunity' and 'visibility,' ECLIPSE will enable ASME to reap the benefits of more prepared and seasoned future leaders."

For additional information on ECLIPSE, and to apply online, visit www.asme.org/Governance/Volunteer/
Early_Career_Leadership.cfm or contact Mary James Legatski at legatskim@asme.org.

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