Attendance has been on the up this year, largely thanks to some very interesting presenters – Gary Friend of Extech (on Foundation Fieldbus implementation); Conrad Mueller of Beckhoff on EtherCat; and Clinton Jensen of Phambili Interfaces (Weidmueller) on Ethernet installation considerations. Many thanks to you guys!
Being all ‘bussed out’ for now, the Technology Evenings for the rest of the year will take on something of the broader picture of instrumentation/automation issues. These will be confirmed in a newsletter to members and regular visitors.
Site visits have been extremely popular and well-attended, especially the recent visit to BMW, and the forthcoming Flight Simulator at OR Tambo airport – these are usually fully subscribed on the evening of announcement. We still have a technical Oktoberfest coming, and probably a power station visit, plus water/sewage treatment plant works still to come. These are one way of ‘benchmarking’ your organisation against the way other people do similar things, so stay abreast!
By the time you read this, the Golf Day will have been and gone. We will report on this, but it is fully subscribed, and will be the success it usually is. Many thanks to Debbie Scott for organising this almost single-handedly!
Apart from the encouraging numbers of people attending the Technology Evenings at the Johannesburg branch, even more exciting is the number of new curious visitors, and also members who have not attended for years. Guess we are doing some things right, so come along and find out.
Schneider Awards
The Johannesburg branch of the SAIMC has a long history of involvement in tertiary education. Apart from our regular ‘guest lectures’ at tertiary education institutions in Gauteng, in 1998 we entered into a joint venture with Schneider Automation to present a medal and a cash prize to the top final year student at each of:
* University of Pretoria
* University of the Witwatersrand
* Rand Afrikaans University
* Pretoria Technikon
* Technikon Northwest (Soshanguve Campus)
* Vaal Triangle Technikon, and
* Wits Technikon.
Around 2004, the then Minister of Education, Kader Asmal, merged some of these institutions. RAU merged with Wits Technikon to become the University of Johannesburg; Vaal Technikon merged with Vista to become the Vaal University of Technology. The Universities of Pretoria and the Witwatersrand remained unchanged.
The Schneider Awards tradition has been maintained through all this, and expanded in 2007 as we introduced two awards at each University of Technology – one for the B Tech course, and one for the National Diploma course
In 2007, the MD of Schneider Electric, Derain Pillay, committed to the sponsorship for another 10 years.
The award is currently R1500 per student, and around 75 students have received the award to date.
The Johannesburg branch of the SAIMC is proud to manage this award, and the medal that goes with the cash prize.
| Tel: | +27 11 312 2445 |
| Email: | ina@saimc.co.za |
| www: | www.saimc.co.za |
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