The Third NGS Monthly Lecture Series overwhelmingly participated!

The third monthly lecture series held on 16 September 2018 (Sunday) at the Department of Roads (DoR) Hall in Lalitpur attracted an overwhelming participation of our members as well as young scientists and engineers. The society would like to thank all participants and supporters of the program, and especially to the program sponsor G. S. Constructions and the venue provider the Departments of Roads.

The previous two lecture series made us estimate the audience to remain below 50, but much beyond our estimation and expectation, the program hall went unimaginably crowded with more than 85 participants! We were only prepared to accommodate at the most 50 participants but we had to turn our deaf ears and blind eyes to all those who spent more than two hours standing all over the hall sides to listen to the lectures delivered by two well known invited experts. Despite our efforts and request to the DoR officials to manage some additional seats (chairs), we were helpless, with no space to add more chairs in the hall! It was a true embarrassment to see our wellwishers and audience passionately bearing with us this logistic weakness in our part. The society and the organizing members sincerely apologize for this weak planning of the lecture series this time.

Nevertheless, we are truly overwhelmed by the large number of participants and their interest in our lecture series events. We started with 30 participants and today in the third lecture series, we have had nearly 100, which indicates that our lecture series programs are getting more and more attractive and are becoming a good forum to learn various issues in geotechnical engineering! We would again like to thank everyone involved in our monthly lecture series.

Having said so, however, we need to address a number of issues while doing these programs, and we promise to improve the following things in the days ahead.

1. Confirm the number of participants beforehand with about 10-15% allowance in increase and fix the number to be 50 at the most. First-come-first-serve system will be adopted and pre-registration and pre-confirmation will have to be made through Facebook messaging or any other means of communication.

2. The program information will be shared with all NGS FB page subscribers at least one week ahead of the program date.

3. Time management will be made more effective.

4. Question/answer (discussion) time will be increased and discussions will be made more precise and interesting.

5. Pre-request for no side talks and no in-room use of phones will be made to all participants before the lectures start. We request the lecturers to do these lectures voluntarily, and they surely spend their valuable time in the preparation. So, it will be an offense and impoliteness to them as well as the audience to make the hall distracted from the lecture content!

Finally, the society would like to thank and honor the invited lecturers of the third monthly lecture series. Mr. Tuk Lal Adhikari, the former President of Nepal Geotechnical Society and the Managing Director ITECO Nepal, a leading consulting engineering firm in Nepal, delivered a lecture on ‘Roadside slope protection measures: Prevailing practices in the Nepal Himalaya,’ while A/Prof. Dr. Shinichiro Mori from the Graduate School of Science and Engineering of Ehime University, Japan delivered the second lecture on ‘Fundamentals of earthquake engineering and their application to the 2015 Nepal Gorkha Earthquake.’

Thank you and we look forward to seeing you all again in the forth monthly lecture series next month.

Nepal Geotechnical Society
20 September 2018