Page 23 - Fall2013

ACTIVITIES OF THE GEORGIA TECH STUDENT CHAPTER
Jason A. Kulpe, Katherine F. Woolfe, Bernard D. Shieh, Shane W. Lani, Brendan V. Nichol, and Ellen A. Skow
Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, Georgia 30332
Editorial Note
The Acoustical Society of America currently has 18 Traditional Regional Chapters, and 9 Student Chapters. A listing of these chapters and relevant links can be found at the web site
http://www. acosoc.org/Reg
Chapters/index_files/ Page333.htm
Over the years such chapters have
come and gone. A typical problem
results from the evolution of the officers of chapters. A Chair of a chapter ordinarily serves for one year. Also, the Chair is ordinarily responsible for calling meetings of the Chapter and for the conduction of elections. Chairs, of course, have varying amounts of enthusiasm for the activi- ties of the chapter. In the course of time, the chairmanship can eventually evolve to a person with no enthusiasm, and who does not schedule meetings and who does not arrange for elections. It is awkward for anyone else to step in and recify the situation, and time goes by and eventually the matter comes to the attention of the National Organization of the ASA, and the chapter is declared “inactive” or defunct.
One of the casualties of this process was the Georgia Chapter of the ASA, which was formed in the late 70’s and which continued on for the order of 10 years. The Georgia Chapter included members from various cities in Georgia,
and it attempted to have meetings at different times in different cities. It was responsible for the organization of the Spring 1980 meeting of the ASA in Atlanta. Chair of the meeting was Clifford M. Bragdon, who had an acoustical consulting firm in Atlanta, and the technical chair was N. N. Reddy, who was a research engineer at Lockheed Georgia.
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact date when the Georgia Chapter went bottom up, but bot- tom up it did indeed go, with the last Chair living in Athens, Georgia, a city located about 60 miles from Atlanta, and matters in regard to a regional chapter in Georgia remained dormant for many years. In the meanwhile, acoustics as a research discipline and as a subject for study continued to flourish and grow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which was the organization with which most of the mem-
bers of the earlier regional chapter had been associated. Also, over the intervening years, student chapters of the ASA began to be formed, and these drew heavily on the enthusiasm of the students at particular institutions which
were concerned with the teaching of acoustics.
Emergence of the Georgia Tech Student Chapter
In 2007, looking to cultivate student interest in acoustics, graduate students and faculty at the Woodruff
“Chapter volunteers bring a growing suite of acoustic demos with them to share, with a focus on interactivity and excitement.”
22 Acoustics Today, October 2013
Fig. 1. The ASA Georgia Tech chapter in the hemi-anechoic test chamber.