Then: Why The Microwave Engineer Should Join PGMTT

This editorial is directed on the surface toward the specific question of why a microwave engineer should join the IRE Professional Group on Microwave Theory and Techniques. It is impossible to answer this question unless the reader is convinced of the worth of professional societies in general. The writer has frequently been shocked by finding engineers (and fairly competent ones at that) who could see no value in technical associations. The argument advanced is usually that the journal of a particular society can be read in a library without one’s being a member, or that the cost of belonging is too great. In these days of spiraling inflation it is all too easy to eliminate such expenses from ever-tightening family or personal budgets.

Professional societies are not new, of course. It may be difficult to trace the exact history, but it would seem reasonable to assume that professional organizations, like trade unions, have roots in the guilds of medieval Europe. Here, people of like interests banded together for the protection and regulation of various callings. At a somewhat later date the intellectual elite organized societies for the exchange of ideas, the honoring of cultural achievements, and the promotion of learning. In this manner the Royal Society of Great Britain and the French Academy of Sciences were born. Most modern professional societies fall somewhat between there’s two extremes.

It was, of course, inevitable that such groups should flourish. Man is by nature gregarious. He must communicate with others. The success of our civilization is, in fact, due very largely to man’s sociability – born partly from the need for protection – for with interdependency came specialization, the exchanging of ideas between men of common interest, and the flourishing of culture and technology.

Present-day professional societies vary greatly in objectives, but among engineering organizations on of the prime aims is the promotion of the exchange of technical information and the reporting of new engineering developments. No one working in design or development engineering can do a creditable job for long without referring to specialized periodicals, a large percentage of which are published by technical societies. It would be well at this point for the young engineer to pause and ask himself: “Do I use the technical societies’ journals in my work?”