Purpose
The ASME Committee on Early Career Development (CECD) is working to expand the production of Early Career Forums to reach more early career engineers.  CECD and the ASME Old Guard joined forces to provide both planning expertise and financial start-up grants to assist selected ASME units with Early Career Forum production. The Early Career Forums (ECF) are conducted to aid graduating students and recent graduate mechanical engineers in making the transition and ramp-up from university to professional life.

Grant Details
The Grant may provide up to $2,000 to assist in the sponsorship of each approved ECF conducted.

• ECF’s may be organized and conducted by any ASME Knowledge and Community Sector unit (a “Sponsoring Group”): District, Section, Sub-Section, Technical Division, or Institute. Other ASME Sectors may co-sponsor an ECF in conjunction with a Knowledge and Community Sector unit.
  
  
• Only one ECF Grant may be made for each geographical ASME District each year. At the sole discretion of the Old Guard, an additional ECF Grant may be made.
  
  
• The ECF to be conducted must prominently recognize “The ASME Old Guard and trhe Committee on Early Career Development” as a sponsor or cosponsor of the forum. Examples might be:

“District F “Early Career Forum or the ASME Bioengineering Division Early Career Forum, or the ASME Philadelphia Section Early Career Forum, or the ASME Penn State Student Section Early Career Forum... Sponsored by the ASME Old Guard & the ASME Committee on Early Career Development”

Corporate and other sponsors should also be appropriately recognized.

Application Deadlines
Applications must be submitted by September 23rd. Pending available funding a second application date of April 15th will be added. Please send the completed application along with all required documentation as a Word or PDF format to earlycareerengineers@asme.org with the subject line “ASME Early Career Forum (ECF) Grant Application”.

Application Process
Received applications will be submitted to the Committee on Early Career Development ECF Project Team for review and endorsement. Recommended applications will be forwarded to the Old Guard Committee for the final selection process at their meeting at the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE). All applicants will be notified after the ASME IMECE (by November 30) and the ASME Annual Meeting (by June 30) regarding the status of their submitted application.

Early Career Forum Results Report
The Early Career Forum organizing committee must submit a "results report" within 15 days after the event. The “results report” should contain attendance metrics, final program, financial report, lessons learned, etc. The “results report” must be submitted in either Word or PDF form to earlycareerengineers@asme.org with the subject line “ASME Old Guard Early Career Forum Grant Results Report”.

For more information on planning an Early Career Forum, please see the Early Career Forum Best Practices Manual.