Can you help promote student membership of ICorr in your local university?
The activities of the Membership Development Committee are gathering pace, with the latest committee meeting taking place in June. A major initiative to grow our student membership is now underway, led by Young ICorr chair Chris Bridge, who has visited the Materials Science department at the University of Oxford to sign up students for free ICorr membership. This has proved to be a far more direct and effective way of engaging with students than email contact with individual academics.
The plan between now and September is to build a cohort of volunteers to roll this process out to other universities in the autumn. If you are willing to visit the Materials Science department of your local university (or even better, the university you attended yourself) we would love to hear from you. This would involve an hour or so of your time to give a short presentation outlining the benefits of membership to a group of students (slides will be provided) and to answer any questions they have about the Institute.
Student membership of ICorr is free and the main barrier to signing up new members is simply lack of opportunities for contact. By reaching out to relatively large numbers of students in this way we should be able to increase uptake of membership significantly – and if we can retain even a fraction of these in the longer term it will make a massive contribution to the sustainability of the Institute.
If this sounds like something you could help with, please contact Chris, at bridge.christian@gmail.com.
Other ongoing membership development activities include refreshing the Institute brand and website, simplifying procedures for applying for membership and upgrades, establishing a policy on subscriptions for retired members, and developing the concept of Corporate Membership. More information on these and other initiatives will follow in future issues of Corrosion Management.
