SWE Pikes Peak Section
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SWE Pikes Peak Section |
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| Volume 11 | Issue 2 |
Dear SWE Friends,
With the school year and the SWE fiscal year solidly underway, reflecting on our Section goals is timely. Aligned with the five areas of national initiative, PPS has turned the interest of our members and pertinent local issues into section goals.
One of our goals for the year is to assist members in sharpening personal skills in the face of a challenging local employment situation. Some ideas include involving successful local entrepreneurs in section activities and collaborating with other engineering societies. The Region I conference committee is taking special care to include program activities that will be of interest to professional as well as student members.
We would also like to continue our strength in supporting younger generations, through activities with student sections, high school career guidance, and introducing middle school girls to science and engineering. PPS has a powerful influence on the community through our volunteer and leadership efforts, whether it is speaking engagements, hands-on demonstrations, scholarship programs or Certificates of Merit.
If you have passion around any of these goals or specific activities on the calendar, please let the point of contact or one of the officers know what you can offer. Your officers are striving to make the program year relevant and exciting for all of our members, and the more we hear from you, the better.
Have a great fall!
Best Regards,
Kathleen Watson
Strategic Initiative: Leadership & Professional Competency.
Section Objective: Help members sharpen personal skills in face of local
employment situation.
Section Objective: Involve local successful entrepreneurs in PPS.
Strategic Initiative: Education & Outreach.
Section Objective: Provide guidance and assistance to local university groups.
Section Objective: Participate in joint society functions.
Strategic Initiative: Knowledge Source.
Section Objective: Continute to be the area's source for career guidance events in local high schools.
Section Objective: Continue to introduce local middle school girls to science and engineering.
Strategic Initiative: Inclusive Organization.
Section Objective: Include ethnic engineering student groups in student programs.
Strategic Initiative: Value & Benefit.
Section Objective: Assist with Region i Conference to include events for professionals as well as students.
Strategic Initiative: Region Director's Challenge.
Section Objective: Focus on membership and growth by reaching out to 3 universities in PPS: UCCS, CTU, USC.
In alignment with the SWE priority for Education and Outreach, the PPS is developing a partnership with Cool Science, a local non-profit organization, to benefit our members and to offer our support to their all-volunteer group. Cool Science targets children in grades three through eight with free chemistry and physics demonstrations to get them excited about studying the fundamentals that will enable them to choose engineering careers when they reach college.
This year, Cool Science is supporting special programs designed to encourage young women to see science and engineering as a vibrant career choice that can make a difference in our community. Through day camps like GREAT (Girls Ready to Explore Academics and Technology), Girls 2.0 and innovative Girl Scout badge workshops, Cool Science is taking an active role in improving the visibility of female professionals to girls about to make important decisions on what they can and cannot see as a profession.
Giving back to the community is also high on the list of objectives for Cool Science. With Colorado College, CU the Springs and the Air Force Academy, Cool Science will provide public demonstrations on Saturday, 18 October, at 2 pm and 6 pm. Hands-on activities will be staged outside the demonstration hall before and after each show. Reservations are accepted, and donations are genuinely appreciated. For reservations, please see http://www.coolscience.org/ .
Cool Science’s next objective is to find a location and support for a hands-on science museum here in Colorado Springs to enhance the classroom demonstration activities. To find out more about this outstanding organization and its generous sponsors, please contact Jen Lacy or Kathleen Watson.
Diane Howe recently received 2nd place in a state-wide competition for the business plan she wrote as a participant in NxLevel Business Planning course.
The course is conducted all over Colorado and put on locally by the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) . Every year, the best plans from the courses are submitted for the competition. Graduates were invited to the Governor's Mansion and the results of the competition was announced during the ceremony.
Diane is a software engineer who has worked in both large and small companies for the past 15 years. In March, the company she was working at, NeoCore Inc, stopped operations after running out of funds. This is the second start-up company in four years that Diane has been employed by and each declared bankruptcy. Undeterred, she decided to take the valuable experience she has gained and explored starting a business of her own.
Diane decided not to implement the business that she wrote the plan on. The original idea was a coin-op laundry in the Colorado College area that offered Internet service for patrons as they waited. Instead, Diane decided to utilize her software engineering experience and recently started TipTop Software Company (www.tiptopsoftware.biz).
Diane loves being an entrepreneur. "I have been positively manic since starting TipTop Software Company," she said. High on her priority list for the new venture is writing a business plan so she has a road map for the next 3 to 5 years.
We have been invited to participate in Wasson High School’s Career Fair on Wednesday, October 29, 2003. Wasson High School has expressed an interest in having women engineers address female students in this forum. The event will give students an opportunity to gain information about career options and the education necessary for those careers.
Wasson High School is located at 2115 Afton Way (on the north side of Constitution Avenue between Union Blvd. and N. Circle Drive).
The Career Fair will be held in the large gym from 7:50 a.m. to 10:55 a.m. There will be set-up time beginning at 7:00 am. SWE-PPS will be assigned one (or more) 8 foot long tables in the gym. We can display exhibits, publications, brochures and request audio/video equipment if necessary. Parking permits for the South Lot will be provided to those attending. Also offered is a boxed lunch and a tour of the school. The Junior Navy Cadets will greet you and escort you to the large gym.
Approximately 250 students will attend the Career Fair during each 30 minute interval. Students interested in engineering careers can approach our table and ask us questions. Participation in career fairs can be a lot of fun -- there's no need to prepare a presentation and it's impossible to predict all the questions students might ask (except the standard: How much money do you make?).
Please call or email Connie King (719-633-4421) if you would like to volunteer to participate in this career fair. If you can only participate in a portion of this three-hour long event, please specify when you would be there. Thanks very much!M
In the past, the Pikes Peak Section newsletter has been distributed as a Microsoft Word document sent via email to anyone who wishes to receive it. Electronic distribution is a substantial cost savings to our section, yet, this method has some drawbacks. Microsoft Word is not free so not everyone has access to the software. And, as some of you may know, the files are not small and can contribute to filling up your mail server quota.
The newsletters are now being done in HTML format to solve these drawbacks. Your free Internet browser can read the standard HTML format. In addition, only the link to the site is sent via email which is much smaller than the entire document. This method has the added benefits of notifying other interested browsers of our activities and of "archiving" our newsletters in one place on our website .
Some kinks are still being worked out. I will not include email addresses on freely available sites because these addresses are then subject to programs that collect them for spamming purposes. Also, I'm not as facil with formatting features of HTML compared to MS Word. I'll be working out these kinks over the next few issues.
ExxonMobil Foundation, SWE,and SECME (formerly the Southeastern Consortium of Minority Engineers) recently co-hosted a roundtable discussion entitled, “Advancing Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering – What Remains to be Done?” in Washington, DC.
The roster requires a password so that our members' emails are protected from "spider" programs. These programs search the internet for email addresses and use them for spamming purposes.
The user id and password is sent to the swe-pps email list (also protected) whenever a new issue of the newsletter is available.