UAE Connected .. IEEE Reached

The 19th of April is a very memorable day in the history the the UOS IEEE SB. It was the day we hosted the "UAE Connected .. IEEE  Reached" event; the event that the IEEE UAE Section ExCom honored us by coming to our university, and giving us further insight about the IEEE institute. In return, it was a very delightful visit for them also, as they were witnessing an original UOS IEEE SB event with all its surprises.

The event, which was hosted by committee members Najla Essam and Omar Ahmed, and kicked of with the branch promo video, which is available on our youtube channel. Next, Rami Shublaq, Branch Chair, gave a touching opening speech talking about his first days in college and joining the IEEE three years ago.

Following the opening speech was a presentation by Eng. Maryam Al Thani, IEEE UAE Section Chair. For the first part Eng. Al Thani spoke about the history of the IEEE and the role of IEEE in the engineering field. Next, she talked about the history of the UAE section and how she came to be on the ExCom board, and she also mentioned the activities of the section from conferences to competitions and workshops. The second part was on behalf of Dr. Bouthina Al-Tlili, IEEE UAE WIE Affinity Group Chair. She introduced the WIE to the audience and talked about its main goal which is empowering women's role in the engineering field.

After the presentation, it was time for a small break. In the break we tried to boost up the audience's energy with a short humorous video clip. We also had a small competition on twitter, where we asked a question about the previous presentation and the audience had to reply to our tweet with the correct answer to win a prize.

The next presentation was by Dr. Fadi Aloul, Chair of UAE GOLD Chapter. Dr. Aloul talked about UAE's GOLD role as part of the IEEE UAE Section and how does someone become a gold member. One of the roles he talked about was making connections between freshly graduated IEEE members, and help them in searching for a suitable job. Another role of GOLD is to inspire, energize, empower, and engage young professionals to envision and realize their dreams.

With all the presentations done, it was time for our little surprise, that was specially devoted to our guests. It was a video of international IEEE Student Branches greeting the UAE Section with the phrase "Hello UAE". It was such nice idea that was suggested by the brach secretary Ahmed Salhin, who decided to contact all the IEEE Student branches so we can come up with this awesome video. Our guests really enjoyed that one.

Then came the part that engaged the audience with our guests. It was the Questions and Answers Part. The audience had a lot of questions about the IEEE, and thankfully they got them all answered by the UAE Section. After the questions were done we announced the winners of the twitter competition, and also the winners of the raffle draw which was prepared earlier. The event ended with a group picture involving our guests, branch counselor, committee members and the audience. Right after that everyone was invited to have a delicious lunch meal.

It was truly a day to remember, and it was such a privilege to have the UAE Section visit us. Its also worthy of mentioning that this was not the first time the UOS IEEE SB invite the UAE Section as they were invited before back in 2008, and had a similar exciting event.