Thank you, Kathryn, for fostering this discussion.
I want to echo Donna's message and especially stress that it is on each of us to determine how involved we want to be with this community. I am a Ph.D. candidate graduating in December and have been an INFORMS member since 2018. During this time, which I find relatively short, I have felt highly supported by a warm and unique group of fantastic human beings. Yet, the first year was somewhat overwhelming, and the following years were all about understating the community and how to get involved. Sharing our stories is key to helping newer members get around and connect with their interest groups. I have to give all credit to my, back then, more senior students, who mentored and guided me through INFORMS. It took a couple of years of watching them get around and meeting amazing people for me to get the courage to take a step forward myself. I applied for an officer position at the Minority Issues Forum (MIF), and, to my surprise, I was elected. The same semester I started being a MIF officer, I joined the OR/MS Tomorrow magazine as co-lead editor. My whole vision of INFORMS changed after that. The 2022 Annual Meeting was entertaining, fun, busy, and rewarding. Seeing things happen from the inside gave me a sense of community that I believe is hard to get otherwise.
I am looking forward to increasing my involvement. I hope everyone else who is in the position I was in four years ago finds their niche at INFORMS. Know I am more than happy to help :)
And to my more experienced fellow INFORMS members, I look forward to hearing your stories and how INFORMS has helped you.
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Sofia Perez-Guzman
Ph.D. Candidate
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy NY
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Original Message:
Sent: 11-21-2022 10:24
From: Donna Ehrlich
Subject: How have your communities helped you?
Kathryn
Thanks for the reminder, Informs is a very large organization which can be full of opportunity or creating a sense of being overwhelmed to the point of doing nothing. Thus, as you shared the value of the way Informs is organized creating communities is what sets it apart. And all it takes is identifying what areas are of most interest and from there begin. Together Informs becomes powerful and valuable but only by the involvement of each of us, however that involvement can be as much or as little as you want and in whatever area is of most interest. I know for me as a faculty and program coordinator for a Business Analytics program I follow the education track and connected with Bill Griffin to provide current content in the classroom. I have also joined the WORMS as well as following a few other forums that have now provided resources I enjoy reading and following.
I look forward to hearing how others are connecting and finding their way around Informs,
Donna
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Donna Ehrlich
Associate Professor, Business Analytics
Park University
New Port Richey FL
Original Message:
Sent: 11-18-2022 14:39
From: Kathryn Walter
Subject: How have your communities helped you?
Earlier this year, I wrote an article in the member magazine about how getting involved with an INFORMS chapter or forum can be beneficial. As we welcome many new INFORMS members who joined around the Annual Meeting, and maybe haven't found a community yet, I thought this would be a good time to circulate it again. I also want to invite other members to share their thoughts on how their communities have been valuable to them. If you belong to chapters, forums, sections, or societies, what's the main thing you've gained from it?
Here's a link to the article: https://pubsonline.informs.org/do/10.1287/orms.2022.02.03/full/
Here's where to learn more about all the communities: https://www.informs.org/Communities
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Kathryn Walter
Senior Operations Research Analyst
Avista Corp
Alexandria VA
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