From the national ASME Website:
ASME is a not-for-profit membership organization that enables collaboration, knowledge sharing, career enrichment, and skills development across all engineering disciplines, toward a goal of helping the global engineering community develop solutions to benefit lives and livelihoods. Founded in 1880 by a small group of leading industrialists, ASME has grown through the decades to include more than 130,000 members in 151 countries. Thirty-two thousand of these members are students.
From college students and early-career engineers to project managers, corporate executives, researchers and academic leaders, ASME’s members are as diverse as the engineering community itself. ASME serves this wide-ranging technical community through quality programs in continuing education, training and professional development, codes and standards, research, conferences and publications, government relations and other forms of outreach.
Mission: To serve diverse global communities by advancing, disseminating and applying engineering knowledge for improving the quality of life; and communicating the excitement of engineering.
University of Pennsylvania ASME chapter — Mission Statement:
To promote and enhance the technical competency and professional well-being of its members, and through quality programs and activities in mechanical engineering, better enable its practitioners to contribute to the well-being of humankind.