President’s Message

This is an exciting time of year for many of us volunteering for the ASCE Austin Branch. October is the first month many of your board and committee members are executing their new roles – myself included! So we might have a few kinks to work out as we put on our next luncheon and fall events, but rest assured we have a lot in store this year with some really talented engineers leading the way.

upcoming events

Andrew Domke, P.E. is leading our first Community Service event for Mobile Loaves and Fishes. Aiming for the week before Thanksgiving, Andrew and about a dozen ASCE volunteers will contribute their time to this wonderful organization. If you’d like to extend some good will around this time of giving thanks, he’s collecting names of volunteers at this month’s luncheon or you can piong him directly at adomke@ferrovial.com

Nick Richman, P.E. and Brent Edwards (EIT) are organizing our 5th annual Kealing Engineering Blitz for the week after Thanksgiving – this is a fast-paced STEM activity with over 400 6th-graders to get them excited about Civil Engineering with a hands-on activity. We’ll need ~40 volunteers to make this successful, and it’s way more fun than your 9am Zoom meeting you’d be doing otherwise. Help these guys out with an hour of your workday to inspire tomorrow’s engineers! Volunteer signups opportunities will be announced at the luncheon, email Nick at nrichman@HNTB.com for details.

Looking forward

As your president this year, my mission is to build momentum on some initiatives that have gained steam at the local and Society levels over the last few years, including:

Roll out a new communications platform for our Branch – ASCE has invested in some new e-blast tools that integrate directly with our membership database, facilitate event registration, payment processing, and provide analytic tools. We’ll be retiring the hodge-podge of systems we’ve used in the last several years for these functions for something that will hopefully make it easier for you to get the info you need (and for us to get better at giving it to you).

Promote ASCE’s next IMAX film, Future World Vision. If you saw ASCE’s 2017 Dream Big film, this is a bigger and badder version of that! It represents ASCE’s next big push into inspiring tomorrow’s engineers to think forward to how our cities and society will function in 2070. Six key trends are explored in a compelling storyline – alternative energy, autonomous vehicles, climate change, smart cities, advanced materials, and policy and funding – that challenge the traditional approach to how we design and build our environment. Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a weekend where Austin Branch engineers and their families went to the Bob Bullock museum to see the film and support our profession? I think so. We’ll be talking more about this when the film comes out in 2024.

There’s plenty of other exciting things we hope to accomplish this year, stay tuned for details in our next newsletter. In the meantime, join us on October 17 at Balcones Country Club for our next luncheon where we will hear from Matt Hollon & Pamela Abee-Taulli with the City of Austin’s Watershed Protection Department on updates to the landscape code.

Sincerely,

Tyler Dube, P.E., M.ASCE

ASCE Austin Branch President