Ready to get started? You'll need some students, a faculty sponsor and a charter. [Note from Bettina: I have also added my own comments to each of these steps]
STUDENTS
The suggested requirement for student chapter formation is 10 interested students willing to gather together and carry out the mission of the chapter.
[The student chapter at Ohio State University started with only four students. (perhaps we were too enthused to care) These four students constituted our initial Executive Council and did all the groundwork, completing the petition and bylaws. Once we were officially chartered we felt comfortable recruiting other members. You should make sure that each of your initial officers will be around for at least the first year of your chapter.]
[Gloria Townsend, from DePauw University in Indiana adds this: "if there is no critical mass, and if one's school is in close proximity to another small school or several small schools, you can join forces to CREATE critical mass, as we've done." The Central Indiana chapter consists of three schools: Butler University, DePauw University, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology]
Only 2 of the officers need to be student members of the ACM -- but student membership in ACM has many benefits and the cost is greatly reduced for students. Benefits include reduced membership rates to our Special Interest Groups and volunteer opportunities in the over 60 conferences sponsored every year by the ACM, many of which are considered main events in our industry. Visit the Student Membership Center for details.
[At OSU, we got some help here from our department, which paid the membership fees for any ACMW student member that wanted an ACM membership too]
FACULTY SPONSOR
Each student chapter must have an ACM voting member to act as the chapter sponsor.
[It is so important for this person to be enthusiastic and supportive. A strong and involved faculty sponsor is critical to the life of a student organization. The faculty sponsor provides continuity as senior members graduate and new members join up. She is an important and visible role model for the student members, as well as being a vital connection between the students and the rest of the faculty.
It's not a requirement, but I attend all the chapter meetings and events. I do a lot of prodding and organizing and cheerleading. I also help find space for the meetings and help the students track down any resource they need.
The students design the events, manage the treasury, do the fund raising and produce meeting minutes on their own.]
CHARTERING
To begin the chartering process:
Request a start up kit.
[The startup kit will contain ACMW posters, ACM membership information, ACM student newsletter, and a report on the shrinking pipeline for women. It will also contain the petition and bylaws, although those are also available online. Some of these materials will be useful in recruiting other members to your chapter.]
You don't have to wait for the Startup Kit to start working on the petition and bylaws.
Complete the petition.
[This form looks simple, but we quickly realized that it required some legwork. For one thing, it asks for an address of the chapter -- before your chapter is even chartered! I went to our department and requested a mailbox be assigned to our proposed ACMW chapter. Mailbox space turned out to be at a premium so we share a box with the local ACM chapter. We also needed an ACMW email account and phone number. Again our department came through with an email account and even a listserv. The department also registered a subdomain for us and mapped it to a subdirectory on my host space. My own phone became the chapter phone. We found out later that OSU has a student organization resource center which could have done many of these things for us.]
Complete the bylaws. These are sample bylaws, but they do contain mandatory statements set forth by the ACM Constitution.
[This is a pretty interesting document and we had some good discussion while filling it out. We had to decide how often we would meet (once a quarter, but I usually press for more often), whether we would have dues (not now, maybe later), and assign all the officer positions.]
Please send the petition and bylaws to:
ACM/Local Activities
1515 Broadway
New York, NY 10036After returning these materials, the information will be reviewed and presented to the Membership Activities Board for charter approval. If you have any questions about chapter formation call 212-626-0514 or send email at chapters@acm.org.
Once your chapter is chartered, you may have some questions about what to do next. I put together a sort of diary of our first year to give you an idea of some of our challenges and how we met them.
THE FIRST THREE MONTHS
We spent the bulk of our first quarter just getting organized. We had to figure out how to do meetings, how to get money, and how to get along with other student organizations. [read more...]
THE FIRST SIX MONTHS
Once our fundamental processes were in place, we felt comfortable inviting other students to be a part of our club. [read more...]
THE FIRST YEAR
We tried to do some new things and we tried some old things done differently. [read more...]
For the latest on OSU's ACM-W student chapter, please visit us at http://acmw.org.ohio-state.edu
For detailed information on ACM-W, please visit our web site at http://women.acm.org/