39 years as a member of the Power Industry Division
I retired at the end of January 2019 following 42-plus years in the power industry and more than 39 continuous years as a member of ISA and its Power Industry Division (POWID). At that time, I also retired from ISA and other professional Society activities to make room for other volunteer leaders. I was blessed to work with a great group of people over the years, and that is what I miss the most. With ISA now celebrating 75 years, it is a good time to share what ISA has meant to me and my career.
I was a student member of a different professional society during college, but it wasn’t a good fit for my chosen career in instrumentation and control (I&C). A few years into my career, a coworker suggested that I join the Instrument Society of America (ISA). The monthly InTech magazine and the newsletters from the two ISA divisions that I also joined were my first contacts with ISA. Those publications helped me to see that I was a part of a much larger group of professionals who had the same technical interests as myself. In the pre-Internet world, the publications catalog that I periodically received by mail gave me the opportunity to purchase books that also related to my career.
A year or two after joining ISA, a change in employment brought me to Birmingham, Ala., where there was an active local ISA section. It provided regular face-to-face contact with people with the same interests who did not work for the same company; that is where my professional network really began to develop. I also had the opportunity to volunteer for leadership roles, which preceded leadership roles with my employer.
My first volunteer role with ISA was as registration cochair for the 1985 ISA Southeastern Conference and Exhibit. After that, I participated in some of the local education night activities of our local section and eventually found myself as the education chair for the section. In this role I worked with one of our state universities in continuing the production of an annual Fundamentals of Industrial I&C short course, which is still given in May each year. I retired in January 2019 as a member of the ISA POWID executive committee.
Dale Evely, PE, ISA Fellow (2007)
