IEEE senior member process.

15 December 2019

Back to Tips and Tricks Table of Contents

Last month, I was elevated to the IEEE senior member grade, as the email says. You can find the requirements for senior membership here.

The key requirements are:

• worked in the field for 10 years, you can count graduate school for some of that,
• be an IEEE member at time of application,
• can self nominate (which I did),
• need three references who are senior members.

I choose to go through with the application because:

• I was paying IEEE fees anyway,
• I met all of the application requirements,
• external markers of quality are needed for the periodic reviews I go through at work.

So given the little work involved, why not? I didn’t realize that one could self-nominate until I got an email from my regional IEEE section. They were helping people get their applications together, and helping people find references.

The process.

So given that prelude, the application process is straightforward. You fill out a web form and submit your C.V. (Hate your C.V. template? Here’s mine.) I was advised to break up my career into first, intermediate, and current professional activities, and aim for brevity. I worked with folks from the IEEE Washington (D.C.) section on this; they were great.

I update my C.V. every month, and did not keep that version from the application. The C.V. I submitted was likely similar to the 2019 one in this repository, but without the whole “IEEE Senior Member” line.

From there, I have anonymized the activities a bit for posting here, but you can get the idea. The “promoted to ___” indicated the grade level within my orginzation, which IEEE seems to understand. You may want to include something similar (or not).

---

First professional activity: Research Agricultural Engineer (a PI role) position with a ___, concurrent with graduate work; Jan 2013-present.

Intermediate professional activity: continued as Research Agricultural Engineer, promoted to _____

Current professional activity: continued as Research Agricultural Engineer, promoted to __.

• Supervise two technicians.

• 1 adjunct faculty appointment in ECE at Marquette University.

• 9 peer-reviewed conference publications, 10 journal articles, and 1 book chapter published.

• h-index of 10, 410 citations.

• Co-PI on >$2 million in awarded grants with 4 proposals.

• co-chair of IEEE Robotics and Automation technical committee on Agricultural Robotics and Automation, from September 2018- present day. Grew membership from 320 to 520 members in 1 year (TC is 20 years old).

• Served on 1 master’s committee, currently serving on two Ph.D. committees.