The ASCE 2016 Multi-Region Leadership Conference was a tremendous event! I was invited by the Southeast Michigan Branch of ASCE Committee on Younger Members (CYM) to attend this year’s conference in Chicago from January 14 through 16. The representatives from our CYM group and branch swapped ideas with members from throughout the country and acquired new skills to provide added value to our members throughout southeast Michigan.

To kick off the event, the younger members group from Chicago hosted an awesome K-12 outreach workshop. Jeannine Finton, the Senior Manager of Pre-College Outreach at ASCE, began the event by sharing some fantastic tips and tricks with us. She also gave us some valuable ASCE resources for sharing our civil engineering profession with kids of all ages. Then, a whole troop of girl scouts joined us for pizza and a tower building competition! My team, “The Fast Thinking Girls” took home the trophy and I was so busy celebrating that I forgot to take a photo!

Throughout the conference, speakers took a lot of time to explain and promote the 3 strategic initiatives of ASCE which are infrastructure, raise the bar, and sustainability.

​Everyone knows that our infrastructure needs a lot of work and ASCE is working to propose practical solutions (such as life cycle cost reduction) to maintain and modernize our nation’s deteriorating infrastructure. Through the raise the bar initiative, ASCE is advocating to increase education requirements for engineering licensure to better protect the public in the future.
Right now, civil engineers require less education then many other professional practices including accounting, pharmacy, law, and medicine. Finally, I learned how ASCE has made sustainability a major focus among its strategic initiatives, aiming to help professionals incorporate sustainability principles into their daily practice.
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I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to attend this conference. I certainly learned a lot about the civil engineering profession and what we are doing to better the world. I was also able to strengthen a lot of my personal skills like leadership styles, communication in the workplace, and educational outreach. I hope to go again sometime soon!