Community Services

PSEC Engineer's Fair:

Our chapter of the Institute of Industrial Engineers is also a member of the Puget Sound Engineering Council (PSEC), which is made up of 22 engineering societies in Western Washington State. PSEC does a lot of general activities, representing engineers that our chapter would be unable to do by ourselves.

PSEC has an annual engineer of the year for various categories including: industry, government, academia, and professional. These are presented at the annual awards banquet. This year our chapter of IIE has nominated Richard Schonberger of Schonberger & Associates, Inc. for Industry Engineer of the Year for his contributions to World Class Manufacturing.

As part of National Engineers Week, PSEC gets the governor of the state to make a formal proclamation with PSEC providing the photographer for the ceremony (Bill Forde from our chapter, who is also Pres. Elect of PSEC this year).

Also as part of National Engineers Week, PSEC holds an Engineers Fair. Our chapter was an active participant in the two day Engineers Fair held at the Seattle Center on Feb. 23 and 24, 1996 (Exhibit A).

This is a big community focused event, since over 25 display booths are manned with volunteers from each of the engineering societies represented. This year we had Science Olympiad, Mathcounts competition, and Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS) team contests along with the engineering societies' displays (Exhibit B).

The displays are targeted towards high school and middle school students who are at least curious about engineering. PSEC sends out a flyer (the script was prepared by our IIE chapter this year) to high schools and middle schools and advertises the event in the newspaper. This year we had over 400 young people attending, many of whom came by our booth and asked specific questions about what Industrial Engineers do. We have several handouts on I.E. and engineering in general, and about our chapter, besides the visual display. We get very young children all the way to adults looking for a second career.

This year we got the IE department at the University of Washington to have a booth display next to ours. Several of the U.W. professors and IIE student chapter members helped staff their booth.

This is also a great opportunity for us to exchange information (including joint program topics) with the other engineering societies.

Four chapter members helped prepare our booth and handouts, and staff our display booth the two days to answer questions from the public. Steve Snelling from our chapter coordinated our booth (pictures in Exhibit C). This was the third year our chapter of IIE has had a booth at the Engineers Fair.

Bill Forde from our IIE chapter was in charge of all the display booths and chaired the PSEC Engineers Fair planning committee (Exhibit D).