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The Untapped Potential of Professional Societies

May 29, 2018

by Chris Lowe, Graduate Research Fellow, Rutgers University, AIChE YP Committee


Almost all graduate students and post-docs are members of professional societies. Why? The member rate for conference registration is offered at a deep discount and when students must travel to present their work on their advisors’ dime, every dollar counts. If you are like many graduate students or post-docs, your professional society involvement begins and ends with the abstract submission followed by a poster or presentation at a conference later in the year. If this describes your involvement with your professional society then you are leaving so much of what they have to offer an early career scientist just sitting on the table.

    Professional societies across the board have the common goal of advancing their individual professions. A key component of this advancement in the chemical engineering field is the development of the next generation of scientists and engineers. Towards this end, professional societies offer many opportunities for professional development and networking. Some of these opportunities are obvious, such as actively networking while at conferences, or sprinkling in career-related workshops with the technical sessions you attend. Others are more subtle, and you may miss out on them when you’re not in “conference mode.”

Mostly all professional societies have professional and career development resources that they provide to their members to address the soft-skills critical to workplace success. These can be blogs or articles on topics such as how to market yourself during a job search or deal with new supervisory responsibilities after a promotion. Many professional societies offer monthly webinars, and at least a few times a year they address non-technical topics. In addition, most groups archive their webinars, accumulating formidable libraries of resources that can help you in your early career development. Watching a webinar can be a nice way to take a quick break from slogging through data, while still being productive and career focused.

    Outside of the virtual world, professional societies frequently sponsor local chapters or sections that hold events much more regularly and closer to home. These sections host happy hour mixers, seminars, tours, and meetings for local members. For example, in North Jersey, the local sections of ISPE, ACS, and AIChE provide frequent opportunities for face-to-face networking, learning, and socializing with nearby scientists and engineers throughout the year.

Local sections also present a less well known, but highly valuable opportunity: volunteer leadership. Volunteers typically lead and develop local sections, special interest groups, and operating committees for professional societies.

Becoming a local section or YP group officer has a number of benefits. It allows you to meet a new group of professionals in your field and collaborate with them on projects or in planning events and meetings. You gain experience using your soft-skills, such as leadership, communication, creativity, collaboration, as you work with people in your technical field towards concrete, tangible goals. Successfully planning a series of meetings, hosting an award banquet, or launching a new outreach initiative with these groups will foster far greater relationships for your network and greatly increases the chances these contacts will be willing to advocate for you in the future. Demonstrating that you can work productively with a team towards a common goal goes a long way towards showing future employers that you are more than just an antisocial lab rat; that you can “play well in the sandbox.” Further, having the chance to effectively manage a diverse team as a part of your professional society involvement will reflect positively on your abilities as a leader, boosting your case for promotion or supervisory responsibilities down the road. Involvement at this level may seem daunting, but as these organizations are largely run on a volunteer basis, there is often a great deal of understanding between members as everyone is volunteering their own time outside of their labs and their jobs. A small investment of time in this way could pay large dividends for you and your career.

    While the marquee annual meetings hosted by professional societies garner the greatest buzz, there are often untapped opportunities for you to take advantage of more frequently and closer to home. Most societies have Young Professionals committees or groups. Here are links to AIChE’s: