Student Chapters

From my experience, a successful Student Chapter starts from highly motivated students who work hard to establish the Chapter and make a name for it locally (in their department), in the university and in the country. The Chapter Officers need to have a good vision as to what is the scope of computational mechanics and where it is heading.

I have the following suggestions regarding Chapter formation:

• At least two positions are needed to run a chapter; President and Treasurer. Vice president and secretary may or may not be needed depending on the size of the group. A key responsibility, though, is communication and public relations, which should not fall entirely on the shoulders of the President.
• There needs to be at least four USACM student members to start a Chapter.
• Decide on a faculty advisor. It should preferably be someone willing to spend some time on the Chapter activities and who is able to bring in speakers and other sources of activities.Once a motivated core group is formed, they should call for an organizational meeting to which all graduate students, post-doc's and faculty who work in fields related to computational mechanics are personally invited. The meeting needs to be well organized and the presenter (who is likely to be the president) should have an idea of the kind of activities and services the Chapter will provide. Give the attendees the opportunity to give suggestions and keep their names and addresses.
• The core group should organize itself and elect at least a president and a treasurer. It should register itself in the University as a student group/association affiliated with a national organization. In this regard, a constitution and bylaws will be needed. The constitution of the USACM should serve as the basis for such with only minor changes to meet university requirements. In this regard USACM should have a close in its bylaws/constitution about Chapter formation and representation. Such standard Student Chapter bylaws can be made available on the USACM web site.
• Once the Student Chapter is accepted by the university, it should contact the USACM administration in order to be listed as a formal chapter and start benefiting from the services offered to Chapters.
• The Chapter need to mark its inauguration by a big event where as many people as possible should be invited, including university officials, faculty and students. This may include guest speakers from aerospace industry, NASA or similar, or a renown authority in computational mechanics as well as displays and graphics. The event can be ended by a dinner. Make sure there is coverage of the event in the local university newspaper or newsletter. Take the names of attendees and their addresses.
• The Chapter should then make a plan for its activities for what remains of the year or the whole year and come with a budget. The Chapter should rely mainly on dues and on local university funding. The USACM can encourage chapters by giving back $10 for every new member they bring in. Also USACM should give some financial support in case an event is important and cannot be covered completely by local funds. However, financial independence should always be encouraged.
• The Chapter should then proceed by establishing a mail-box in the department, a web page and a mailing list for announcements.
• The next step is to write the first newsletter of the Chapter to be sent to all those who attended the first organizational meeting and the inauguration meeting. The newsletter should contain a word of thank for those who attended, some comments about the success of the inauguration event, and a description of the planed activities and the required (or acquired if available) budget.
• The next activity should come 30-45 days after the inauguration event so that the participants do not forget about the Chapter. Subsequent events can then be more distant in time.
• The Chapter should involve local professors, researchers and students as much as possible by arranging local technical and social events.
• Usually, Student Chapters concentrate on lectures/seminars and guest speakers. While these are good they should not make the core of the activities. Other options are regional mini-conferences, workshops, initiation to software, invitation of software companies (ABAQUS, ANSYS PRO-ENGINEER ...) and aircraft/aerospace companies (Boeing, Lockheed Martin ...) and social activities.
• USACM should require an annual report from all chapters and should invite Chapters' representatives to the USACM congress held every 4 years. More importantly, USACM should promote interaction among the various Chapters in order to allow students (mainly) from one institution to use facilities/databases/software... (if not expensive and permitted by law) available at another one and vise versa.
• USACM should also promote a spirit of competition and reward among the chapters.
• USACM can designate a committee to create an exhibit/display about the USACM and computational mechanics. This display can be borrowed by Chapters and used in their activities.
• Finally, the key to success of Chapters is motivation of its members.

USACM can initiate chapter formation by extracting all the names of student members and whenever there is a minimum number of students in one university, a letter should be sent to them asking them to organize themselves in a chapter and giving them some guidelines for doing so.

top

  HEAD OFFICE for USACM:  
  USACM Office
  P.O. Box 8137
  Austin, TX    78713
  Phone: (512) 529-7333
  email: info@usacm.org