How to increase interest in ASME

[ehilge]

I'm hoping this is a good place to start with this question. I'm the incoming president of my university's ASME branch and I want to find unique ways to increase interest. Maybe I'm being to idealistic, but I feel like the organization has seen quite a drop off in interest in the last few years and is becoming irrelevant except for its name. I know plenty of students who just pay the dues and don't show up for anything to have it on their resume. Last year we had quite a bit of dfficulty in filling our officer positions. I am fairly certain that all to often the only reason people come to our monthly meetings is for free food. We always have speakers at our meetings, often a professor talking about his research or something like that. We try to do tours of local industries and regular social events. We've also sponsored design-build programs every year but hardly anyone shows any interest anymore. Part of this could be because a lot of upperclassmen are involved in research and there are a couple of other large design build organizations on campus (mini-baja, SAE formula). So those draw students away from the ASME projects.

So, I'm looking for any sort of ideas to increase interest in the organization and get students to want to come. Particularly, I want to get a group of younger guys excited about the organization. So please, let me know if you have any ideas. Things we could do during the meetings? other events? I'm open to just about any suggestion.

 

[berkeman]

I'm hoping this is a good place to start with this question. I'm the incoming president of my university's ASME branch and I want to find unique ways to increase interest. Maybe I'm being to idealistic, but I feel like the organization has seen quite a drop off in interest in the last few years and is becoming irrelevant except for its name. I know plenty of students who just pay the dues and don't show up for anything to have it on their resume. Last year we had quite a bit of dfficulty in filling our officer positions. I am fairly certain that all to often the only reason people come to our monthly meetings is for free food. We always have speakers at our meetings, often a professor talking about his research or something like that. We try to do tours of local industries and regular social events. We've also sponsored design-build programs every year but hardly anyone shows any interest anymore. Part of this could be because a lot of upperclassmen are involved in research and there are a couple of other large design build organizations on campus (mini-baja, SAE formula). So those draw students away from the ASME projects.

So, I'm looking for any sort of ideas to increase interest in the organization and get students to want to come. Particularly, I want to get a group of younger guys excited about the organization. So please, let me know if you have any ideas. Things we could do during the meetings? other events? I'm open to just about any suggestion.

I was the chairperson of our IEEE student chapter my senior year of undergrad, and faced a similar situation. One of the best things we did was to organize a couple of field trips to large semi-local EE companies, to tour their facilities and see how their engineers worked. The companies paid for the bus and refreshments, because it was a recruiting tool for them. And it was very popular with the IEEE members, because they got to see real-life work in progress, and get recruited by the companies.

You might look for local ME-type companies that would be interested in giving your group a tour. If you have them local enough, you wouldn't need to work out the bus funding part.

 

[RCMAC]

I have just recently changed jobs and looked into jioning ASME. I was previously part of ASABE and really liked the organization. I found that there was a huge stumbling block when I went to try to find information on standards. At ASABE we were allowed access to standards as part of our membership fees. We could then download and print standards after finding the correct ones. At ASME if you do not know the correct standard and are searching for it, you might have to buy the standard to make sure it is the correct one. As a new part of a small company this does not work. This too me and several of others in my linkedin group this is a stumbling block for us to jion.