Thanks

Check out Andres’ blog at http://budurl.com/inclusionparadoxbook

I feel better having expressed that, but the question was really all about forms of communication among the section. Formally, the BSCES focuses on having a very easily understood and easily edited website (www.bsces.org), but informally, for outreach purposes, we run http://www.engineeryourfuture.org, plus run the Facebook page Engineer Your Future and put out Twitter messages as “Engineeryrfutur”. Much of what we put there extends beyond New England and even beyond just civil engineering (since at the K-12 level, there is no need to be so compartmental), so I encourage everyone to join the facebook group and tune into our tweets.

We were not only able to attend the conference and participate in the career fair, but also held a workshop for the PE Exam Review, with some members of the Seattle section as the panelists.

We agree that ASCE Sections and Branches can promote diversity in the field by collaborating with other organizations, and want to encourage others to follow the same path, and members to get involved and help us advocate for the value of diversity and inclusion, together with our partners.

Diana Giraldo, PE
ASCE Seattle Section Diversity Committee Chair

I received an NSF grant in 2003 under the ADVANCE program to provide leadership and business training to senior women engineering faculty who were in academic leadership positions or were considering that option. 49 women faculty, mostly from the midwest, completed the four-day, intensive program. We have continued longitudinal data collections on these women’s career development.

I prepared my department (which includes Mechanical Engineering) for our ABET self-study and site visit in 2007. Our faculty engagement in the assessment process was so compelling, that we presented our assessment model at the 2008 ABET Best Assessment Processes Symposium, which was titled, “Enabling Faculty Willingness to Assess Outcomes in a Small Department.”

Our civil engineering capstone design class was recently honored with one of NCEES’ Engineering Awards for Connecting Professional Practice and Education (http://ncees.org/engineeringaward/). This two-semester class has partnered with our local municipality and two practitioners since 2003 to provide design, permit preparation and easement requests for small, traffic-bearing culvert replacments. The mechanics of this class have been published in the following outlets: “How a University-Public Works Partnership Benefitted Civil Engineering Education and the Municipality.” By Deborah J. O’Bannon, Erich G. Schmitz and Thomas J. Kimes. Journal of Public Works & Infrastructure 1(1):107-116, 2008. (Invited); “Will Work for Free: Students Acting as Pro Bono Designer Engineers.” By Deb O’Bannon, Tom Kimes and Erich Schmitz. 2007 APWA Congress, San Antonio, TX, 9-12 September 2007; “Would you let students design your bridge? We did.” By Thomas Kimes and Deborah O’Bannon. APWA Reporter 78(9):28-30, September 2006; “Would You Let Students Design Your Bridge? We Did.” By Deb O’Bannon, Tom Kimes, Masood Alemifar and Erich Schmitz. 2006 APWA Congress, Kansas City, MO, 10-13 September 2006; “Design-to-Build = Civil Engineering Capstone + Municipality.” By Deborah J. O’Bannon and Thomas J. Kimes. ASEE National Conference Proceedings, Chicago IL, 18-21 June 2006; “Municipal-university Synergy for Civil Engineering Academic Service-learning.” By Deb O’Bannon and Tom Kimes. EPICS 2006 National Engineering Service-Learning Symposium, Washington DC, 23-25 May 2006; “Build It and They Will Come: Academic Service-learning in Engineering Education.” By Deb O’Bannon and Jerry Richardson. SWE 51(4):32-34, 2005; “Civil Engineering Capstone Design at UMKC: a partnership with government to design small structures.” By Deborah J. O’Bannon and Thomas Kimes. Integrating Practice into Engineering Education Conference Proceedings, Dearborn MI, 2-5 October 2004.

I served on a public panel for five years to help guide Kansas City’s plan for correction of combined sewers, which led to hosting a radio talk show on AM radio, titled “Water, Water Everywhere.” The show airs Sunday mornings, and is an interview show with local experts on water issues. The show’s website is http://waterwater.umkc.edu and includes podcasts of previous shows. Radio is a turn in my academic career that was unexpected, but a lot of fun.

My professional society involvement presently includes serving as a corresponding editor for ASCE’s Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice, chairing the Society of Women Engineers’ Editorial Board, and past-president of the SWE Kansas City Section. Past national service includes serving on SWE’s Board of Directors, and chairing ASCE’s Technical Committee on Hydrologic Dispersion and Transport (now Environmental Hydraulics). I also serve on Kansas City’s Ethnic Enrichment Commission as the alternate commissioner for Israel, where we promote our countries through culture, food, music and dance in the community.

Contests and Events:
We run a number of contests and events. Our two local contests we run ourselves are a model bridge contest, in its 16th year and incorporating random materials each year in its specifications, and an online bridge contest, in its 7th year and run utilizing the West Point Bridge Design Program and system. The third contest overseen by our section is the Future City Competition, which although technically belonging to the National Society of Professional Engineers, is run entirely by BSCES members, and is in its 11th year locally. All of our contests are free to students except Future City, which nationally collects $25 per team for the software, and BSCES funds that cost for schools expressing need.

We kick off our contests with a huge hands-on event. This year, we brought in engineer/author Celeste Baine to give the students an overview of engineering and show them how fun and exciting it can be. On May 21, we will celebrate the winners of our online bridge design contest with a prime rib dinner free to the top 10 students in each age category, and will have Engineers Without Borders president Bree Carlson as the keynote speaker and award winning bridge designer Firooz Panah show the students how he designs bridges in the “real world”. To end the regional Future City competition and Model Bridge Contest, we invite the top 10 teams to a colossal “National Engineers Week Boston Awards Luncheon”. At this event, we make sure to introduce the winning students directly to our keynote speaker, members of the National Academy of Engineering, and our New England Engineering Achievement Award winner. This year, we were proud to introduce them to Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot, Dr. Wesley Harris (esteemed MIT astrophysicist/provost and a great role mo0del for not only African American but all engineers everywhere), and Amy Smith (our award winner, founder of the concept of appropriate engineering, inventor extaordinaire, Peace Corps volunteer, and winner of the Leadership Award from Popular Mechanics Magazine — check out a clip from one of her presentations: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/amy_smith_shares_simple_lifesaving_design.html). We received so many calls and emails from teachers and parents for giving them such an opportunity. We run all of our programs in conjunction with MassPEP (Massachusetts Pre-Engineering Program) and NUPrime (Northeastern University’s program to encourage students from minority backgrounds to understand engineering).

As for other events, we hold an engineering carnival free to the public called ThinkFest. Held on a Saturday, this event is run by a collection of college student groups, professors and design professionals and has a wide array of design challenges and demonstrations. Students collect points for higher achievements in design challenges and cash them in Chuck E. Cheese (or Skee-ball) style. We also provide food and coordinate buses from urban neighborhoods. The event is held at Merrimack College on the third week of March, and is run in conjunction with their catapult competition, where the winner receives a four year scholarship to their school worth $100,000. We also invite one middle school each year to our National Engineers Week Event described above and run what we call “ThinkFest Jr.” for them. Our other large scale event is held within Massachusetts Construction Career Days, where we run a similar hands-on design competition for 1800 high school students over 3 days.

Direct Diversity Efforts:
We bring the NSF/WGBH creation “EngineerYourLife.org” everywhere. We officially represent the initiative at NACAC college fairs on behald of the National Engineers Week Foundation, but pass out their materials at all of the school visits and field trips we run. We set up tables and find role model women to represent the effort at ThinkFest, Construction Career Days, and any other fair at which we are present. We find that although the initiative was aimed at young women, it presents engineering in such a way that all students we see are intrigued.

We wholeheartedly embrace the NAE book “Changing the Conversation”, and as a follow-up to the national meeting of engineering societies in February, we held a meeting with the many engineering societies here in New England as part of the DOME STEM Symposium at Harvard two weeks ago. Over a dozen societies were present as we held an open discussion of efforts to convey messages identified in the book.

We have initiated discussions with WGBH (local Boston PBS), the Museum of Science, and ASCE National, as well as numerous engineering societies, to undertake a project centered around the movie “Tinkerbell”. Just watch the movie all the way through and I promise you’ll have your jaw hanging open. That little fairy in the green dress is…an engineer. We have not yet approached anyone at Disney because we are trying to get ideas sorted, but I personally can’t imagine a better way to get young girls to get excited about engineering. Aside from wanting to help create hands-on activirties and a roaming museum exhibit, we would love for a collaboration of engineering societies to fund and lend input on a DVD extra about engineering. A second movie about Tinkerbell comes out in the fall, and all indications are that there will be many more Tinkerbell DVDs. Many of us feel that we have too often heard the complaint that the media doesn’t help encourage engineer role models and too often draws on stereotypes. To drop the ball when a character so beloved is presented in such a way would be inexcusable.

I love feedback, encouraging or critcizing, so feel free to contact me.

The Diversity Symposium with over 150 in attendance was a day’s events joined clients, representatives of government, corporations, nonprofit organizations and educational institutions, as well as consultants, in sharing best practices, methodologies and resources to advance interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics through diversity initiatives.

Panel discussions focused on education reform, community outreach, and workforce and economic development. Case studies shared examples of ways that organizations have increased revenue, shareholder value, market share and employee productivity as a result of diversity efforts.

“The U.S. needs a large and diverse workforce with the science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills that are critical to meeting 21st century challenges,” Tarolyn emphasizes. “Forums like this one create public-private partnerships that can improve the way we educate, train, recruit and retain these professionals.”

For more information on the Diversity Symposium visit the website at

http://www.ascesoutheast.org/events/diversity_reg101608.pdf

Tarolyn Buckles, A.M. ASCE
ASCE S.E. Michigan Diversity Co-Chair

ARCADIS U.S., Inc.
65 Cadillac Square, Suite 2719
Detroit, Michigan 48226
Tel 313.965.8436
Fax 313.965.8907
Cell 313.999.5863
Email tarolyn.buckles@arcadis-us.com
http://www.arcadis-us.com

These revenues should be restored, this will provide the DOT’s with a predictable funding stream that can be used for financing purposes. The process used by New York State of periodic bond issues only increases the states’ debt and puts a bandaid on the problem.

What is tragic is how our politicians jump in front of the cameras to complain when a bridge fails when in reality they are part of the cause of the problem! Our society should be lobbing more stronlgy on this and asking all its members to contact their representatives at all levels of government. If we don’t take point on this issue nothing will change.

Ivan Ramirez, PE