Dear Members,

Welcome back to the corner. In the previous issue’s corner I have mentioned about the important IESL events that are usually held in the latter half of the session. In this issue I would like to focus on member participation in the Annual Sessions related events. Traditionally there is fair participation, including representatives from sister professional bodies overseas who are also members in the Federation of Engineering Institutions of South and Central Asia (FEISCA), in the Inauguration, Seminar and the Site Visit of the IESL Annual Sessions.

Participation at the Presentation of Technical Papers saw a remarkable turnaround last year reversing the worrying declining trend observed in the recent past with significant participation from the engineering community as a whole. We were encouraged by the positive manner in which heads of both public and private organizations responded to our requests to encourage engineers working under them to attend the presentations which is a forum for sharing knowledge and experience and is aimed at general advancement of the science and practice of engineering in all disciplines.

The heads of organizations will be solicited for their support this year too to mark the days scheduled for the presentations; Monday, 19th and Tuesday, 20th October, 2015, to be marked in their calendars as days reserved for engineers in the organizations to attend technical paper presentations at the IESL.

The difficulties that engineers in the provinces have in attending the presentations held in Colombo is known and we are planning to do special campaigns through our provincial chapters to encourage engineers in the provinces too to participate in this year’s presentations.

The Call for Papers for the IESL Annual Sessions have always attracted technical papers in large numbers They are based, however, largely on research conducted by academics. Contribution by professional engineers from the industry has been comparatively low despite the fact that much on-the-job experiences are floating about and could be tapped as resources to be presented as papers sharing wide range of experiences from multitude of projects being implements in the country. Senior engineers in the industry could play a pivotal role in mentoring junior engineers under them to present papers of experience sharing value. They could perhaps integrate their effort in this connection with the supervision they are providing to engineers aspiring to attain the charter. I will end this column with that bright note until we meet again in the next corner.

Eng. (Dr.) S. B. Wijekoon
President of IESL