A crucial step was to conduct an awareness session on IEEE Computer Society by inviting an expert who had experience in volunteering to IEEE. We chose Mr Chamika Sudusinghe who is currently serving as the Student Activities Committee Chair in the IEEE Sri Lanka chapter as our resource person. He is a final year undergraduate from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Moratuwa. When looking into his past IEEE experiences, he has been an active volunteer of IEEE since 2017 and he had taken part in many projects conducted with the collaboration of IEEE at both university and national levels. He was also the student representative of the IEEE Sri Lanka Section for the term 2020/21. For his remarkable involvement in IEEE, he was the first IEEE student volunteer in Sri Lanka who won the Richard E. Merwin Student Scholarship award.

We successfully conducted the awareness session on the 20th of February 2022 at 7 pm via Zoom with over 100 participants. Mr. Chamika Sudusinghe began by introducing himself to the audience, then shared his past experience about volunteering at IEEE and what are the benefits he gained from IEEE. Before moving into IEEE Computer Society, he gave a brief understanding of what is IEEE. It is important because the audience must be aware of the parent organization of what they are going to join. Furthermore, he explained the importance of an IEEE membership for a student.

Subsequently, we reached the apex of the session. Speaker Mr. Chamika Sudusinghe started talking about the IEEE Computer Society by pointing out some annual reports. Then he acquainted the official IEEE Computer Society’s website to the congregation demonstrating how that website helps to stay up to date about new technology, research, projects, etc. Following that, he pointed out the specialty of Computer Society compared to the other technical societies in IEEE. He did not forget to mention about the scholarships and awards that can be won from the IEEE Computer Society. He emphasized that an IEEE membership is not required when applying for a membership in IEEE student branches, and they can be a member moving forward. Finally, he winded up the session by thanking the organizing committee and the audience. Afterward, we conducted a live Q & A session intending to further clarify participants’ doubts. Most of the participants actively participated in the Q & A session and cleared up their queries.