Dear AOC student members and friends:

The 2005-2006 Student Activity Committee (SAC) of AOC was formed during the 2005 ASABE Annual Conference at Tampa, Florida. As a unique and important committee in AOC, this SAC will be dedicated to building a community of our young Chinese engineers working in the ABE field, promoting networking and communication, and better serving for your professional and career development.

We did not realize there are so many Chinese students working on Agricultural and Biological Engineering in the U.S. and Canada until we searched online department by department in more than fifty universities in 2005. It turned out that there were more than one hundred students in this field! We strongly felt that there is a need to connect all these colleagues together and build up a community of our own.

Thanks to AOC Executive Board’s support, our suggestion was adopted and we are pleased to announce that a student would need to register and pay the $5 membership fee only once during his/her entire student years to become an AOC student member and to enjoy all the benefits AOC provides. We believe, by attracting more colleagues to join, each of us will benefit more from this community.

n order to accomplish our goal of promoting communication and connection, we have developed a mail-list which will be used as a platform for news distribution and information exchange. By registering as a student member, you can post messages on it. You can ask professional questions, post your resume for job searching, and share information such as hotel room sharing during conference… You can join this newsgroup by following the link (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aoc_china/) or contacting our newsgroup administrator (aoc_china@yahoo.com)

We will devote ourselves to helping you for future professional development and providing you with the information you are interested. With more than fifty faculty members and one hundred students working in this area, we believe it is a tremendous resource for each of us if we can effectively integrate and distribute useful information in a timely manner. The first idea that came to our minds is an E-News that features fast delivery, convenient access, and ease of reading. With the help of AOC faculty members and other individuals, we are trying to collect and compile all the information into an E-News which will be distributed to all student members biweekly or monthly. The news will focus on post-doc or faculty position openings, funding opportunities, and other information that you may be interested in.

Working closely with the AOC Executive Board, the SAC will continuously represent all student members’ interests and will try to organize events better serving your needs. In 2005 ASABE Conference at Tampa, we organized student gathering and invited AOC distinguished professors Dr. Ting and Dr. Zhang to give speeches on how to succeed in academia in the U.S. and Canada (you can download their wonderful speeches on our redesigned website: http://www.aoc-web.org/forstudent.htm). Currently, we are working on expanding the number of awards of the annual AOC Student Paper Competition.

This is an open community and we sincerely welcome you to join us and give us suggestions! With your valuable support, we are confident to better serve you and to further promote communication and networking among all young engineers in agricultural and biological engineering.

Best regards

Sincerely yours,

Student Activity Committee of AOC