Hello fellow water peeps!
First, thank you for your support of AWWA’s student and young professional programming. This is the future of our industry and I’m proud of us for investing in them. I love working with students and young professionals because they are confident, socially responsible, tech-savvy, diverse, and they give to causes they care about – one cause being safe and sustainable water.
AWWA has 3,500+ student members, 80 student chapters, and 3,000 young professional members throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and India. Our newest student chapters include Florida Atlantic University, University of North Florida, Purdue University, University of California – Berkeley, University of South Carolina, and AWWAIndia – Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
Funding for students and young professionals helps us provide webinars to student chapters for free, it helps us create programming at our conferences, such as conference mentoring, networking receptions, job fairs, poster competitions, committee speed networking and much more. One of the significant student/YP events of the year is our AWWA Leadership Training and Young Professionals (YP) Summit, which precede the Utility Management Conference every year. These two events consist of technical training and professional development workshops. Last year, we hosted students/YPs from 34 out of our 43 Sections! Once again, thank you for that. The students/YPs wouldn’t be able to attend without the support of their Section and their employer.
(Cari Maciolek, Student Program Manager)
The biggest program launching this year is our pilot mentoring program for AWWA student members. I worked closely with our Ad Hoc Mentoring Committee to complete research, create guidelines and applications and set goals for this program. This is open to student members in Florida, Intermountain, Ohio and Ontario and will run from October 15, 2018 – May 31, 2019. The goals of the program include the following:
- Increase personal fulfillment and promote professional development
- Increase, capture and transfer of institutional knowledge to support the industry in the face of a changing workforce
- Enhance mutual respect between students/young professionals and experienced professionals, and a sense of community at the Section level, as well as the Association level
- Promote a culture of generosity and open dialogue
- Enhance the value experience for members
We look forward to seeing successes, as well as learning from the pilot program and we are hopeful that this program will be expanded in the fall of 2019.
We continue to see growth in the student and young professional arena, so please keep up your efforts in recruiting, engaging, and retaining them!
Questions, ideas, comments, or you just want to say hello? Call/text/email Cari Maciolek at 720.775.9020 or cmaciolek@awwa.org.