One of the main concerns of the IEEE is student recruitment and retention - namely to 'catch them early and not to let them escape'. There is actually a rather serious problem in attracting young new members from the universities and colleges and then keeping them as members after they graduate. This problem is exacerbated to some extent by the fact that students, certainly in the UK, have always been encouraged to join the IEE (now the IET since 1 April this year) in order to make it possible for them to become Chartered Engineers (CEng) later in their career – the passport for moving into full professional engineering; IEEE does not provide this route as such.

The UKRI Communications Chapter has tried to address this problem. A few years ago the chapter found that there were around 25-30 institutions in the UK which enjoyed a good active track record in undergraduate telecommunications engineering as a first degree subject, and so we then encouraged them to appoint a University Liaison Officer for running IEEE student activities. The idea was to organise at least two ‘recruitment events’ each year and for this they were to be given a little operational funding and also a significant rebate on their own ComSoc membership fees.

Initially we proposed to award a final-year project prize and certificate, winners to be decided by the departments concerned, and with the understanding that they would subsequently join IEEE as student members. This prize was followed up three or four years ago by a second award for best 'communications engineering' performance in the penultimate undergraduate year, and then quickly followed by a proposal to introduce a third (project) prize for Masters level telecommunications courses. The picture shows the notice-board 'flyer' which was sent out to the universities concerned.

Formally the three prizes are specified as:

• Penultimate-year prize - £100 and certificate for undergraduate students who have achieved distinction in their penultimate year of study in a communications-related degree course.
• Final-year project prize - £100 and certificate awarded to the best final-year undergraduate telecommunications project in the department.
• MSc project prize - £100 and certificate awarded to the best communications project at MSc level.

Project areas include, but are not limited to, subjects such as communications systems, software, networks, radio, satellite, optical, internet, signal processing, multimedia and information theory, to mention just a few.

Recently there has been committee discussion as to which of the prizes, if any, would have to be stopped if chapter funding became a problem; in fact, in order to retain all three, we have just been forced to abandon our travel support for students attending conferences. We encourage other Section chapters to consider awarding course prizes.

Peter Hill
UKRI Communications Chapter