The talks are held alternatively between the north and south of our two counties, where we attract between 30 and 100 members and guests to each talk (we do need to improve our marketing). The STEM activities are either fairs, where we have an IET stand amongst the industrial and academic stands, or workshops that we run in schools. This combination of talks and STEM events has been taking place each year for at least as long as I’ve been actively involved in the Network (about seven years), but this year we thought that we would try something different.We start our talks with a 45 minute period where we provide tea/coffee, sandwiches and cake and everyone has a chance to chat with the other engineers who are present. Usually we need to encourage people to move into the lecture theatre and so we thought that our members might like an early evening event where they could spend longer chatting with their committee and other IET members and guests.
So in the middle of July, before the holiday season really got underway, we held the Sussex Summer Social at the Crawley Town football stadium, overlooking the playing pitch. We put up displays of our schools activities, of the coming season’s talks programme and of CPD and professional registration. We also had a community group telling us about one of the first women engineers, Dame Caroline Haslett who was born and lived locally. We even had a quiz and the refreshments seemed to go down quite well. In fact the feedback was all very positive. I’m sure that members enjoyed trying their hand at building an LED torch, one of the IET activities that we do at STEM fairs, and programming traffic lights, part of our ‘control technologies’ workshop. We now need to decide whether we hold a similar event next year, perhaps in the south of our patch, or repeat the event in two years time. Our next newsletter will ask our members what they think.