Today

Happy New Year 2023!

George Aslinger is our new president and Rama Etekallapalli is our new vice president.  With support of many past presidents, treasurer, longtime members, we have another year to plan and look forward to.  

Past

Looking back, we are thankful for many past presidents that continue to contribute to the club and activities important to the "community".  Two shared their thoughts recently...

From Greg Sedrick:

We joined CEC in 1990 as personal career and service activities.  Greg was a new young assistant professor at UTC and Mary a practicing engineer.  Joining CEC and activity participating was a path to know the STEM community as well as fill out the community service requirement for Greg’s faculty tenure and Mary’s consulting practice.  What also happened was the incorporation of our family into this new and wonderful professional family.  Paul Shoun, Jack Anderson, Marty Johnson, Lynn Russell, Tom Lyons, Terry Reynolds, Almeda Frazier, Iris Sesko, Norbert Koch, Myron McCay, Bob Bradshaw, Jay Floyd, Doug Jacobs, Jack Wagner, Ed Chapin, Uwe Zitzow, Lulu Copeland and many others became sisters and brother to us as well as aunts and uncles to our children. Being from Missouri this was a great personal benefit!

On the professional side we were supported by the weekly technical meetings that allowed Greg to sully pass both the FE and the PE exams and Mary to increase her technical knowledge.  We have no doubt the technical sessions were instrumental in Greg’s teaching and applied research at the university and Mary years of contributions to the region. The professional fellowship led to the creation of a Chattanooga Technology Council (not the same entity as today’s CTC) when Greg served as dean of UTC’s engineering and computer science college.  The council united the officers of all the Chattanooga’s STEM societies as we faced declining membership and participation.  The STEM family came together to not only tackle their society membership decline but also to re-energize their involvement in community building activities. Additionally, when Greg and the engineering faculty needed community support for the approval of both the UTC Challenger Learning Center and the new engineering, computer science and math building, the members of the CEC answered the call without hesitation.  

These gifts from CEC membership led to our continuing our connection to our Chattanooga HOME as our careers took us across Tennessee. We decided to retire in Chattanooga and remain in touch with our CEC family!

From Gabe Kurtz: 

I first attended a CEC presentation somewhere around 2014 and was impressed by the broad engineering knowledge within the members and presentation material at that time. For several years with the meetings being in person, I was only able to go to a few meetings per year with not being able to get away from job responsibilities during lunch time for the presentations.

With the onset of COVID and meetings going remote, this allowed me flexibility and being able to attend most of the meetings and tours to become much more involved, even to the extent to help by volunteering to become the VP and Chair in 2021 and 2022 to help steer the club, which has been an excellent location to expand being able to serve outside of being involved with Orange Grove Center, UTC, TVA’s ABLED ERG, IEEE, NSPE, EPRI, and others. The most impressive item that I’ve noticed about the membership are not only the broad width of types of engineering background and skills within the membership, but also the amount of continued active ex-chairs that bring large amounts of experience and help to continue to promote, support, and help drive the CEC path forward.

The CEC has provided many resources to me along the way and a path to continue to help serve others. I’m privileged to being a member, to pick up more actively to support the club within the last few years, and to serve with implementing new streamlined tools to help with online programming, additional funding approved to expand in giving to Bryan College for student scholarships, making new and/or stronger ties with greater Chattanooga educational and industry partners, and am looking forward to continued growth with learning from others and service going forward.

Future

Looking forward, the Club hope to continue to make a difference in growing the engineering community, support education and be the convener of groups sharing our vision.  We hope you will share your vision and stories; we hope more will join this profession and HOME.  March 2024 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Club.  Greg has graciously volunteered to lead the planning committee for the event(s).  Please sign up and recruit others to participate.