In February I attended two events that renewed my belief that as a professional organization, it should be one of our primary goals to support the young men and women of the new generation to pursue their dream of becoming an engineer. One of the events was our Past Presidents dinner meeting in February where we hosted the Tim Fleming Memorial Award ceremony. The recipients for this year’s award were Taneil Evans of the University of the Pacific and Andrii Noga of Sac State. More about the Award Ceremony in the article from Marco Palilla. Under the championship of Marco, ACEC Sierra chapter has been supporting the Award funds for a long time, and we just donated $3,000 to continue our support. By the way, our Past Presidents Dinner meeting was a great success. Thanks to the perseverance and hard work of Marco and Debbie, 14 past presidents, some dating back to the 80s attended the meeting, shared their stories, and had words of wisdom for the budding engineers. Thank you all for your continued support and encouragement!
The other event was a real eye opener. It was the annual award ceremony held by San Joaquin Engineers Council in the UOP campus. My 50-minute drive from Sacramento was extremely worthwhile. Most of the evening was focused on Scholarship Award. Eleven high school, Junior College and University students from San Joaquin and Stanislaus Counties were recognized for their academic achievements, leadership roles, and most importantly their strong desire to pursue a career in engineering and contribute back to society. ACEC Sierra Chapter has been a sponsor of this annual scholarship for a long time, and as the President of the Chapter I had the privilege of spending the evening with our sponsored award recipient, Grace Sanders and her parents. Please read my story in this newsletter to learn more about Grace and her career dreams.
While the main focus of our organization is to support the community of engineers and land surveyors in general, we should broaden our support when some extraordinary event affects the community as a whole; because in the end we, engineers serve the community. One such event was the Camp Fire which affected the lives and livelihood of numerous people. ACEC Sierra chapter decided to extend our support to the students of Butte College affected by the fire. Please read more about it in the article by Marshall Moore.
Last month I, along with Dana Remington and Harvey Oslick of Sierra Chapter attended the ACEC California Engineering Excellence award and the board meeting in San Francisco. One of the important items discussed at the board meeting that affects our member firms is the Government Code 1090 (aka Conflict of interest/Continuity of Service). ACEC California is leading some effort in addressing the issues rising from the interpretation of the code.
Now, let me remind you of the upcoming events. On March 20, we will have a joint meeting with Cal Mentor where a panel of local transportation agencies will discuss about utilization of SB1 funding in local projects and the benefits to our communities. Our April meeting will feature Young Professional Forum. Please bring a young professional from your organization to our April meeting and show them the ACEC way.
I mentioned our chapter’s First Agency Excellence Awards Event in our several newsletters, and will keep mentioning until the event is over. This is my request to all Sierra Chapter members – think of your favorite public agency that you enjoy working with, think why you enjoy working with them, and submit your nomination. The deadline to submit your nomination is March 30, 2019. Few nominations have already been forwarded, but we need more. We need your help to make this event successful.
See you all on March 20th at our next meeting!
