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IEEE President's Note: Why Students Should Stay with IEEE

spectrum.ieee.org

1–10 of 56 posts

Re: IEEE President's Note: Why Students Should Stay with IEEE

#3
> For more than 40 years, IEEE has been a great place to build my personal brand and to create a valuable professional network. I know it can do the same for the next generation of engineers.

If they have to make this case, it suggests some combination of 1) the organization doesn't actually provide these opportunities to most people, or 2) people don't actually care about this anyway. For me, this language is business-speak. When the business people in my company start talking like this, I stop listening. It's not interesting. Hard problems are what's interesting to me. That's why I'm in this field, not to "network" or hone a "personal brand".

For me, IEEE student membership was worth it for the significant registration discounts at IEEE conferences. After graduating, since I'm no longer in academia, the one and only benefit ceased, so I immediately canceled my membership.

Re: IEEE President's Note: Why Students Should Stay with IEEE

#4
I couldn't read what he had to say because his site opened an interrupting dialog element asking me to subscribe or join or something.

If I see that, I immediately stop reading and close the window.

There is no better way to show me you are not actually talking to me than interrupting yourself and me with distracting bullshit UI elements.

Re: IEEE President's Note: Why Students Should Stay with IEEE

#5
maybe if IEEE wanted to keep students, they could support them, unlike during the 2019 ISCA peer review fraud incident where an IEEE fellow was caught in peer review fraud that lead to a student's death, and essentially it took years of intense pressure for them to stop allowing a cover up, do a minimal investigation, and in the end most of the people involved got a secret punishment that was likely a minimal slap-on-the-wrist at best

https://pbzcnepu.net/ieee/index.html

Re: IEEE President's Note: Why Students Should Stay with IEEE

#6
post #3

> For more than 40 years, IEEE has been a great place to build my personal brand and to create a valuable professional network. I know it can do the same for the next generation of engineers. If they have to make this case, it suggests some combination of 1) the organization doesn't actually provide these opportunities to most people, or 2) people don't actually care about this anyway. For me, this language is busine…

I don’t know about IEEE in particular, but -

> 2. People don’t actually care about this anyway

Is substantially different from “this doesn’t generate value”, “the people who do not care would were they to engage with it” (ie: the justification for marketing anywhere), and “people, especially young people, know how to evaluate this kind of thing.”

In particular, there’s a generation gap around networking, professional organizations, etc, and indeed that may be because those organizations aren’t valuable, or it could be some combination of “the older generation didn’t explain this to the younger” and “the younger generation is convinced it knows everything it needs to”, and I suspect if you’re old enough at least some part of that will ring true to you.

Re: IEEE President's Note: Why Students Should Stay with IEEE

#7
post #3

> For more than 40 years, IEEE has been a great place to build my personal brand and to create a valuable professional network. I know it can do the same for the next generation of engineers. If they have to make this case, it suggests some combination of 1) the organization doesn't actually provide these opportunities to most people, or 2) people don't actually care about this anyway. For me, this language is busine…

I'm truly interested in your thoughts... where would you discover truly hard problems? What do you feel would make you qualified to work on them, over, say someone else? enough to prove it to someone that could authorize such a salary and expenditure of time? Unless you were self-funded, of course. I've always wondered where and how would you discover what the edge of the knowledge and science actually is, and stay ahead of it? That is, to prevent reinventing the wheel and not to waste time? Just wondering as I've understood it by a lot of people over my career lifetime. Thank You.

Re: IEEE President's Note: Why Students Should Stay with IEEE

#9
I cancelled my IEEE membership years ago. I enjoyed their magazines and journals, but remember being frustrated at the time with their pricing. After I cancelled, they became aggressively spammy, and they are now on my shitlist. This President's Note seems to be more of the same.

Re: IEEE President's Note: Why Students Should Stay with IEEE

#10
post #3

> For more than 40 years, IEEE has been a great place to build my personal brand and to create a valuable professional network. I know it can do the same for the next generation of engineers. If they have to make this case, it suggests some combination of 1) the organization doesn't actually provide these opportunities to most people, or 2) people don't actually care about this anyway. For me, this language is busine…

I also once in a while have IEEE membership because of some conference discount (even if it is not such a nobrainer as with student membership). Other than that I am just seeing a very intransparent huge org that does not provide much benefit. Some field are dominated by US researchers, some by Chinese. IEEE does not show much interest in breaking non-inclusive networks. Unlike ACM (which is far from perfect), I don't even recognize small bits a tranformative spirit. I had colleagues that had their IEEE status in their footer and used their IEEE, but most of those have been retired by now.
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