I am honored to be your incoming President and I want to acknowledge the leadership provided by Clint Pletzer and last year’s board members. I am excited to welcome new and returning board members who I am certain will successfully fulfill their duties. I look forward serving as the Central Florida Chapter President and continue to move forward the initiatives and new projects we have been planning for several years.

I truly believe the best way to get the full value of your FES membership is to get involved. Your support to our organization and its programs will render the best personal value. Our chapter offers numerous opportunities to participate in various committees, activities, and community service events. You can increase your technical expertise and gain personal satisfaction from helping others, being involved with the student chapters, mentoring a young professional or being involved with MathCounts or the K-12th committee where you can motivate the future young engineers by completing a presentation on your area of expertise to elementary school kids who can be motivated to pursue an engineering career. These are opportunities to make a change within our profession and our local community so don’t wait and get involved.

Just a few weeks ago the Florida Engineering Society had the annual conference in Marco Island, it was great seeing many of you there. Our local chapter received first place for retention, recruitment & overall for the extra-large chapter category. Furthermore, our chapter also received the third place for the ACE award, for our community service event at Give Kids the World. Thanks to Robert Best and Victor Steck for leading our community service committee and all the members that participated in that activity. Additionally, our chapter member Eric Jimenez P.E. received the engineer of the year award, we are super proud of his achievements and continued support to our chapter. Overall, it was a very successful year for our chapter, and we want to continue to strive for more this year with your help.

Equally important, this year, we prepare to have another successful year by providing some of the events all of you love. In October we bring back our local chapter annual Fall Bowling Event, our luncheon sessions will be very interesting this year, one of the sessions will focus on the success of the award winning Wekiva Parkway section 6 project with WGI, Arcadis and Superior construction presenting alongside with their partners involved in the project. Our chapter will also continue to partner with our great friends from ASHE’s Central Florida chapter to promote more activities. April brings our best event of the year, the annual golf tournament, and some other community service events currently under planning. Another big goal is to continue to grow our chapter membership and motivate current and new members to get involved and grow within the chapter and society at the state level. We look forward seeing many of you support these great events.

In addition, I need to give a big shoutout to Francina Gil and Angel Rivera for updating our website and keep it updated, take a minute, and browse through it (link provided below) as we have the latest information available for all our chapter members. Our chapter is also releasing a sponsorship program for companies to help support our efforts to gather additional donations to continue to promote events and scholarships. We encourage our local engineering company partners to participate and help support our chapter goals and take advantage of the benefits we will include in this program. I also want to emphasize our gratitude for the many volunteers and committee leads which continue to work hard for our chapter year after year to make sure their committees strive to achieve their goals. Without your help we would not be able to achieve the activities and consistency that our chapter achieves year after year. THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR YOUR SACRIFICE AND SUPPORT. Finally, I can’t close this message without mentioning that we have our UCF student chapter up and running for this new year. Thanks to our past president Clint Pletzer for striving to get this chapter up and running and thanks to Alex Jimenez for being selected as the UCF student chapter president. I look forward working with Alex and all the UCF chapter board members to promote their development. Clint will continue to work with this chapter as they continue to promote their chapter and increase their student members. 

In closing, let me say thank you again for the privilege of serving as your president for this coming year. I have no doubt, our society strives for excellence and our team is up to the challenge to continue building on past efforts by our predecessors and develop new initiatives. Together we can achieve all our goals and continue to grow and prosper. Thank You to all who have given me and the board members their support. Due to your support and hard work, we will continue to succeed.

Sincerely,



Alfredo Rodriguez, P.E.

FES Central Florida Chapter President