How I became a Senior Member of IEEE

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Dev Publicity

15 min readDec 16, 2023

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering is the world’s largest professional association of engineers, including the ones in computer science. IEEE invented Wi-Fi, bit representation of float-point numbers, and many other things. They develop standards for the industry and have conferences on virtually any technical subject.

The benefits of membership are mostly networking opportunities, professional reputation, and visibility in the field, which was exactly what I wanted. There are multiple levels of membership:

Anyone can become an associate member.
Anyone with some education or work experience can become a member. See the requirements here. There are 210 thousand regular members at the moment.
Senior Membership is harder. You first join as a member and apply to be promoted by a committee. There are 51 thousand senior members now.
Fellow Membership. This is rare and invite-only. One must be a Senior Member for 5 years, and this is the primary reason to get your senior membership faster. You never know when the future Fellow grade can save you in our turbulent time. There are 7000 fellow members now.

There is also Life Membership. These are people whose age plus membership tenure add up to 100 years or more. It is granted automatically and added to the level you are otherwise at, to form Life Member, Life Senior, or Life Fellow. Unfortunately, there is no Life Associate.

If you do not yet qualify as a Senior Member, IEEE can bring you networking but hardly any visibility out of the box, so you may want to wait until you qualify for Senior to save on the membership fee. However, Life Membership perspective is an incentive to join as soon as you learn of the program, if you want this impressive tag.

The membership fee is the same regardless of the grade, $175/year in 2023.

I joined IEEE as a member on Jul 10, 2023, and became a Senior Member on Oct 11, 2023. I will be eligible for nomination as Fellow in the autumn of 2027 to be elevated in 2029. I will become Life Senior or Life Fellow in 2053 at the age of 68.

Aged makeup on me by Tatyana Khvostikova.

Here is the full story of my joining and promotion so far.

Do you need this?

Most of the activities of IEEE involve hardware and physics in some way. I am a pure-software guy, and at the moment I don’t do any AI or robotics. If you are like me, be aware that you will get nothing for your field from them, just the title.

Joining

This is straightforward. Go to https://ieee.org and sign up.

Membership counts in calendar years, so sometimes you get a discount for the first incomplete year. Joining on Jul 10, 2023, I paid $84.50. This discount is updated quarterly, so check your timing. As of September, they already were selling the next-year membership at the full price.

If an incomplete-year discount is applied, you will see the effective dates before paying. It could be that waiting for a few days in spring will save you $40–50. Other than that, do not wait.

The highest membership level you can initially join is “Member” (not associate or student). For that, one must have a certain education or work experience. My membership was confirmed instantly. Nothing I entered in the form was verified in any way, nor was I asked to submit my diploma.

In September, they invite you to renew your membership for the next year. This immediately gave me the “2 years” badge, after only weeks of membership, which makes summer the perfect time to join:

You will find an electronic membership card in their internal system:

When joining or renewing, you can opt for a plastic membership card sent to you with regular mail without tracking. I was worried about delivery because regular mail was unreliable in my location. I asked them to FedEx it to me at my expense, but they could not do that. A 3rd party contractor handles printing and mailing, the scale is high, so they cannot accommodate individual requests. If regular mail does not work for you, put a friend’s address.

However, I did receive my plastic card, even three of them in total:

The first year Member card
The second year Member card
The second year Senior Member card.

Cards are sent to production each Friday. From the respective Fridays, two cards arrived at my post office in 33 days, and one arrived in 53 days.

Senior Membership

Requirements

Be a member.
10 years in the profession. An education can somewhat reduce this.
5 years of “significant performance”. Team leading or select senior job will do. See the full definition here.

If you qualify, you can apply immediately after becoming a member.

Encouragement

If you qualify, IEEE encourages you to apply because senior members have a higher renewal rate, as shown here. So your promotion is beneficial to everyone in the organization, and you can expect help at every point.

Application

Apply here: https://www.ieee.org/membership/senior

The form takes some of your education and work experience from your profile, so fill it in first, and then fill in whatever is left in the form.

The next steps prompt for your experience and performance.

My experience was (in plain text):

Jun 2011 — Current: Freelance developer.
Jun 2022 — Jun 2023: Akvelon Inc., Tbilisi, Georgia, Software Development Engineer. Flutter. Made 2 libraries and 2 web apps for Apache Beam.
May 2021 — Mar 2022: Boss of Life LLC, London, UK, Flutter Team Leader.
Jun 2019 — Sep 2020: Calltouch, Moscow, Russia, PHP Developer. Report generation, auth system refactoring.
Nov 2014 — Feb 2016: Sergey Gran’s Training Center, Saint Petersburg, Russia, Chief Technology Officer.
Dec 2003 — Mar 2014: GetSoft.ru, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, Founder & Developer.

My significant performance was (in plain text):

Dates: July 2023 — Present
Role: A member of the Google Developer Expert program in Flutter (less than a hundred people worldwide):
Proof: https://developers.google.com/profile/u/alexey-inkin
Dates: June 2022 — June 2023
Employer: Akvelon LLC
Location: Tbilisi, Georgia.
Role: Flutter Team Leader and Frontend Architect
Achievements: Developed 2 apps for Apache:
— Apache Beam Playground, https://play.beam.apache.org
— Tour of Beam, https://tour.beam.apache.org
Proof: https://github.com/apache/beam/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Aalexeyinkin+is%3Aclosed
Dates: Jan 2022 — Present
Achievement: Developed and maintaining “app_state” Flutter package for navigation, now in top 17% most used Flutter packages.
Proof: https://pub.dev/packages/app_state/versions
Date: July 2021
Achievement: 3rd place in one of the cases at “Leaders of Digital” hackathon, the largest one in Russia (as a team member).
Location: Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
Proof: https://leadersofdigital.ru/event/63008/case/740611/results (No English version, please use Google Translate.) [defunct as of December 2023]
Dates: June 2019 — Sep 2020
Employer: Calltouch Solutions LLC
Location: Moscow, Russia.
Position: Senior PHP Developer, in charge of the auth system.
Achievements: Critical vulnerability fixes, query optimization.
Proof: See the supporting letter from the CEO.
Dates: Nov 2014 — Feb 2016
Employer: Sergey Gran, Individual Entrepreneur.
Location: Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Position: CTO at a Training Center.
Achievements: Created a learning management system, fully set up all IT infrastructure for marketing, sales, customer learning, and more, for the company with 100+ teachers and 2500+ students.
Proof: See the supporting letter from the owner.
Dates: Dec 2003 — Mar 2014
Employer: GetSoft.ru
Position: Founder and CTO.
Achievements: Developed a software marketplace from ground up, promoted it to 40k monthly users (the website was retired and turned read-only in 2014).
Proofs (No English versions, please use Google Translate):
- My name at the bottom of https://getsoft.ru
- Earliest snapshot of 2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20040605081740/http://getsoft.ru/
- Statistics of 40k unique monthly visitors in 2009: https://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/getsoft.ru/summary.html?lang=en

I attached a few supporting letters from my past employers for activities that could not be verified independently. I was not sure if this was required. I had those letters anyway for another reason.

Put what you want to be honored for

When you are granted the senior membership, there is no mention of what you received it for. The only way for you to confirm that is to show a screenshot of your application that stays read-only in the console.

Think twice what you want there. For instance, for EB-1A green card program you need membership in associations that require outstanding achievements from their members. It is debatable that IEEE Senior Membership qualifies for that, because “significant performance” feels inferior to “outstanding achievement”. You can still try to present this membership for that program, but for that, you will need either supporting letters from your reviewers (you can’t know them), or the committee chair (they are busy, and I would not count on that), or at least the screenshot of your application to suggest that you were judged for that specific achievements.

UPDATE 2024–03–25: I have seen an RFE reading that IEEE Senior Membership does not qualify for the criterion of membership in associations.

So while some merits may be easier to describe for the purpose of significant performance, others may be more beneficial in the long run.

Proofs

Later I became a member of the panel that reviews new applications for senior membership. We were not instructed to require specific proofs for significant performance, so every member decides what they think is sufficient.

My rule of thumb is that significant performance should be verifiable:

Most members put their Google Scholar profile, which makes it obvious if they qualify. If on the fence, I try to look up their top article. Articles by themselves do not qualify. There should be research that led to an article, in which the applicant played a key role.
If they have no articles, I try to verify their position. If it is a leading position, it should be googlable.
If I can’t verify their position, I look for supporting letters at the minimum.
Unsupported claims of role do not qualify. A reviewer can render the decision of “Pending” and request more evidence.

That’s my paranoid approach. Other reviewers may be more relaxed, and it takes more than one reviewer anyway. If two reviewers disagree, a third one is selected, and then the panel chair decides. So they can overrule a single paranoid reviewer’s decision. But if you can meet that standard, your approval is almost certain.

References

You must collect 3 references from existing senior members. I did not know anyone there. In this case, IEEE suggests direct messaging or reaching a section chair at a given email.

IEEE’s platform for communication is called Collabratec. It has a directory with advanced filters, and a messenger. So I did not reach out for assistance and just started messaging existing members right there.

Since I am a Google Developer Expert, I filtered senior members working for Google, and that gave sense to my pitch.

I also found some first-year senior members of approximately my age from my country, because they should not be overwhelmed yet and still remember what my need feels like.

The message was simple. In a few sentences, I just asked for a reference for the senior membership without explaining why I needed it, and briefly listed my most significant projects:

It works like this. When a senior member agrees to refer you, they give you their membership number, which you put on the application. This number is not public, so they cannot be abused (that’s why my number is blacked out in the photographs of my membership cards).

I sent 29 messages in total. 4 answered and sprightly agreed, no one was unhappy. My timeline:

Aug 2: Sent the first 10 requests.
Aug 3: Two agreed.
Aug 7: Send 19 more requests.
Aug 8: +1 agreed.

I still waited for 12 more days until the fourth one agreed, because I thought that once I submit my application I will depend on those I listed on it, and if they vanish it will get stalled.

Do not wait for this. Turns out, you can add more references to an already submitted application until three of them click to approve.

My references took from a few days to two weeks to approve my application after they initially agreed and I submitted it. This is because they need to explain what they think of your application in their own words. Allow time for this.

Application Review

All applications to Senior grade are reviewed a few times a year by the Admission and Advancement Senior Member Review Panel. Their schedule is here. This was the schedule for 2023:

They say the application must be received at least 7 days before a meeting, so time your efforts.

The panel meeting on my application was on September 30.

On the day of the panel meeting, the status of your application changes to “In Review”, and you can no longer edit it:

Although the meeting is a single-day event, it took them a long time to start updating things.

Day 10: My application changed to “Approved”:

Day 11: I got the email:

And my Collabratec account was updated to show the new grade.

Day 21: A letter from the IEEE President has arrived:

Electronic Confirmations

In Collabratec, my status has changed to “Senior Member”:

And I can now be found with filters among 5 senior members in the country of Georgia:

The digital membership card now reads “Senior Member”:

There is also this digital certificate advertising another person in the bottom for some reason:

Membership Card

After awarding the Senior grade, you will normally get a new plastic membership card the next time you renew your membership. If you are elevated in the autumn and the renewal for the next year is open, just wait until you are elevated and then renew. You will get a card reading “Senior Member” automatically.

I renewed for 2024 before my elevation. I asked the support if I could renew for 2025 and that would trigger the new card creation. They confirmed I can renew early, but the card will not be issued until the renewal period for 2025 starts (likely, in the autumn of 2024).

Turned out, I could just ask them to re-issue my card. They did it for free.

Plaque

Senior members receive a bronze plaque:

It is delayed for about a year, and the current status of plaque manufacturing and delivery is here. As of October 2023, is was the following:

Statistics

The Chair of the Admission and Advancement Committee announced that there were 600+ applications of which about 90% were approved. This gives you good a chance once you collect references.

Confirming the Membership

No Public Profile

I needed a confirmation of my Senior membership for the EB-1A program. However, IEEE has no way for a membership grade to be independently confirmed.

You have no way to opt in for a public profile that can be viewed anonymously. For comparison, with the Google Developer Experts program, you can create a public profile, and this is a great model for all memberships.

IEEE often sends you emails asking for your experience with them and feedback. I answered and suggested introducing truly public profiles. If you want that you can drop them a few lines too so they know the demand for this.

Confirming the Tenure

When setting up your profile, you can make it “public”. It merely means that authenticated users can see you, so it is not really public, but it is better than nothing.

Anyone can sign up for a free account at Collabratec without becoming a member. Non-members can view basic info. This is how they see me (the first profile is my ghost account to check how things look for non-members):

Note the badge “2 Years IEEE Membership Milestone”.

And this is after clicking the profile:

Unfortunately, two important things cannot be seen this way:

The grade. The badge “X Years IEEE Membership Milestone” does not even guarantee the “Member” grade. One can be a Student or an Associate, the two grades below Member.
The current status. If the membership expires and the next year is not paid for, the badge stays. Only with the full access one can tell that.

For instance, on this screenshot with full access, the first account has its membership expired (no grade icon on the right-bottom of the avatar, like with the second one):

So if you want to prove that you had been holding any membership for a certain time to someone who is willing to sign up for a free account there, you can use it.

Employer Notification Email

With this form, you can request a confirmation email to be sent to your employer:

When I asked the support about confirmation options, they suggested I fill this form with myself as the recipient, and then print the confirmation.

I submitted it and got this after two days:

This letter does not serve its purpose because it is sent from an individual’s email address, and such addresses at ieee.org are available to all members regardless of grade. So the recipient really needs to send a request to senior-member@ieee.org to re-verify the authenticity of the letter, and this is not what many will do.

From the form:

Name goes into the greeting in the email and the letter text.
Organization only goes to the attached file name like
Alexey Inkin - Organization.pdf

The line “Dear _(name)_” rules out putting “To whom it may concern” there.

The phrase “a member of your organization” makes it unusable for most applications. For instance, I was seeking confirmation for USCIS for a green card of extraordinary ability. Although it is possible to enter “Immigration Officer” to produce “Dear Immigration Officer:” line, “a member of your organization” kills it.

So it’s not much more than a notification to your employer if you need it.

For the confirmation to USCIS, I first wanted to wait for my Senior Member card to physically arrive, but it took longer than usual, so I just sent them screenshots of the electronic letters. I thought that if they asked for more evidence, I would send them a photo of the membership card because it should arrive by then. But they approved my green card petition without that. I showed other merits there, so don’t know if IEEE membership ended up playing a part in my petition.