Weekend 1: ASME Managment Divison

This weekend started off with a simple question I placed on Facebook. "First weekend in Texas... what to do". I got one response and It turned out to be very serious one. A Drexel Alum posted saying there was a ASME Management retreat being held in Austin this past weekend. He left his number, and just said call for details. I called him on Saturday morning and he gave the address and gave a forward message to the chair asking if I could sit in as a guest. The retreat was being held on University of Texas Campus at the A&TT Conference center. Each engineer sitting on the board was very welcoming and surprised that I wanted to spend my weekend with them! The group discussed action items and the largest topic was the Global Engineering Management Conference (GEMC). This conference will be held in Dallas in April of this year, many keynote speakers geared on managing global groups and engineering type tours. I actually liked the management prospective that was conveyed, the group of professional people could move from one topic to the next, dispute civilly and conclude, as well as have fun. This was a huge change than what originally pushed me away from Drexel's ASME student section. This gave me enough interest to pursue this group when I become a professional in a few years.

Anyway, Saturday evening we went to a Texas style ribs place called Stubs. We got the restaurants endless plate of ribs...it was amazing! I feel that my Korea Co-Op has helped me in more ways than one. Especially in the case of talking to industry professionals, I can engage confidently in a conversation and I can arm myself with a large variety of stories geared on international collaboration or just pure technology discussions. After dinner, the younger folk (22-88 year olds) decided to hit 6th street bar/live music district. I made an interesting connection with the the volunteer retreat chair, he is Alum president of my best friend's fraternity and a good friend of my best friend as well. So odd that we would make a connection like that when both of us are from the east coast. We played the evening away in a shuffle board bar, with some very intense competitiveness included! I have never seen these boards before, long tables with pucks the size of your fist that you slide down the smooth surface covered with sand. The puck that stops closest to the opposite side wins the point of all combined pucks. It

really reminded of full sized shuffle board (stick one) or Bocce Ball.

The group invited me back for the second day, I gladly accepted. I arrived in the morning and had breakfast with the group. More meeting until noon, then finished out the day with a tour of

University of Texas (UT) campus. The Host chair, a senior lecture from UT, asked me to return in February to do a guest Lecture focusing on my international research/travel to his engineering students.

So the moral of the story? Posting your thoughts on Facebook, may turn out to be a fantastic networking opportunity!