Fred Irons

(1967)

Have you ever encountered a former classmate in a professional setting? No matter how different your situations, there is a bond that allows instant familiarity, brings back a rush of memories, and often opens the door to a new job or other opportunity. By taking advantage of current technology and with your support, we can re-establish a community of Maine ECE alumni.

This is what makes the ECE Department different. Why do we need to be different? Competition. We are trying very hard to recruit students at a time when, in spite of unprecedented demand and higher-than-national-average starting salaries, potential students are leaving the State or choosing other careers. Why? What can we offer potential students to convince them an engineering education at UMaine is in their best interest? What can ECE do to maintain a healthy and growing student population? I sincerely believe that our alumni and current students are the best recruiters. Don't worry, I'm not asking you to quit your day job (or even moonlight) to help us.

What do we need? We're not asking much. We need your interest. We need your willingness to keep track of Department happenings and volunteer your opinion and encouragement from time to time. We would love to have you volunteer to mentor a current student. We encourage you to register on our alumni web page, so former classmates and the ECE Department can keep in touch. In fact, ABET (the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology that certifies our program) has mandated an engineering "quality control" program that requires us to poll alumni about the effectiveness of our program at specified intervals after graduation. It is essential that we be able to find you and collect your opinion.

We also need your financial support for activities that are difficult to fund from other sources, primarily in the area of attracting students. No one gives you a grant to recruit students. We would love to offer more high school orientation programs and involve more K-12 teachers to demonstrate what engineering is all about. Above all, we intend to offer many more scholarships to entice the best and the brightest high school graduates to ECE. We are in competition with schools offering very attractive packages to top students.

In exchange for your support, we can offer connections, and hopefully, a special relationship with our Department. We can connect you to future employees and connect you to former classmates. We can provide access to state-of-the-art research in the Department. Our goal is to renew a collaborative relationship based on a peer-to-peer, (rather than a student-professor) basis. It is possible, with our increasing activity in distance education, that we can entice you to enroll again!

I would greatly appreciate a gift of your time or money. We urge you to register on our Alumni data base page . To be informed of Department happenings via a short email once a month, send a message with the word 'subscribe' in the subject field to umece-request@eece.maine.edu. If you're ever passing through Orono, please stop by. We'd love to see you.

Best regards,

Department Chair

Carleton Brown's Three Ring Circuits
(4MB PDF file)

Walt Turner

(1947)

John Field

(1969)

Carleton Brown

(1955)

John Vetelino

(1969)

Edmund Sheppard

(1962)