Mentors at work

Tuning in to technical careers through SECME

The organization aims to get pre-college students interested in technical subjects early enough so that they will be ready for a university program. That means starting in elementary school or even earlier

By Tom Stabile
Contributing Editor

SECME, Inc aims to increase the numbers of underrepresented and underserved students who want to study science, mathematics, engineering and technology in college. The organization's efforts start as early as pre-kindergarten and extend through high school.

SECME (www.secme.org), established in 1975 as the Southeastern Consortium for Minorities in Engineering by the engineering deans at seven universities in the Southeast, sponsors programs for students, teachers and parents. It reaches many students through school-based SECME clubs. It offers training and graduate study programs for teachers, to help them spark student interest in the sciences. It supports and forges partnerships with organizations that share its goals. And it recruits college students to mentor young children and helps them develop math and science skills.

In 1997, the alliance renamed itself SECME, Inc, and branched out to include schools, universities and technology-based businesses in seventeen states from New York to Arizona, as well as the Grand Bahamas. It is based at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA).

Over the years, SECME has reached its goals in part through volunteer contributions of its former students, says Ed Aebischer, a SECME program manager. "While they don't really owe us anything, they know what it takes to go through an undergraduate track," he says. "They are SECME alumni who want to give back to the program."

Etosha Cave got real experiences with SECME
Etosha Cave is a great example. She joined the SECME club as a freshman at Booker T. Washington High School (Houston, TX), an engineering magnet school. Cave jumped right in and actively participated in the monthly meetings, group projects and competitions. She learned about both science and camaraderie.

"SECME also promoted communication and teamwork in all of our activities," Cave says. Among the memorable moments, she says, were field trips to visit engineers at work. The students shadowed engineers at Houston-area businesses and participated in engineering-related activities at the companies.

Cave remembers one event in particular: the "Fly High" program she and SECME club members attended at NASA. The program involved developing and conducting experiments aboard the space exploration agency's KC-135 airplane, also called the "vomit comet," which flies parabolas over the Gulf of Mexico to simulate weightlessness for astronauts. Cave's SECME team developed an experiment called "toys in space," to test the effect of changes in gravitational force on the trajectory of paper airplanes and other toys shot from a sling. While Cave was too young to go on the flight, she helped analyze the data collected by her older SECME colleagues, including a video record of the experiment.

Cave stayed with SECME through high school. Now a sophomore at the newly opened Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (Needham, MA), Cave sees SECME as a force that inspired her career choice.

"Now that I'm in college, the one thing I really notice about SECME is that it gave me a sense of discovery, wanting to explore things on my own and ask questions - to take things further and to wonder why things happen," Cave says. "That's really what engineering is about."

Cave spent part of the past summer as an intern at the SECME offices at Georgia Tech. She assisted with the graduate-level study institute for teachers nationwide, which focuses in part on how to inspire students from diverse backgrounds to appreciate math and science. She also got the chance to sit in on the workshops for teachers.

Cave especially enjoyed getting an up-close look at SECME, since she hopes to one day start a nonprofit organization.

Hieu Le: "I just wanted to give back what I got out of SECME."

SECME helped Hieu Le enjoy technical subjects
Hieu Le also gives back, by helping students in SECME competitions. He first knew the thrill of those contests when he was an elementary school student newly arrived from Vietnam with his family. He followed his older brother to SECME club events at an Atlanta middle school, where members constructed "cars" from mousetraps and other basic materials. They raced the cars in local, regional and national SECME competitions. "I just kind of tagged along, seeing what my brother did," Le says.

By the time he got to middle school and joined SECME himself, Le was hooked. He went on to win the national mousetrap car championships twice as a middle school student and he placed second in high school. From the simple mousetrap spring and the makeshift wheels and axles, Le says, he learned mechanical engineering theories and basic principles of motion, aerodynamics and friction.

Le's SECME experiences also involved group math and science projects and visits to engineering departments on college campuses. It didn't hurt that Brandon Southern, his former teacher at Paul D. West Middle School in Atlanta, was a big SECME booster and now serves as its "dean of competition."

Le says SECME helped him appreciate technical subjects and gave him a strong grounding in engineering. In 2002 he earned a degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech and enrolled in its graduate program. He now works full time at Science Application International Corporation (Warner Robins Air Force Base, Macon, GA). As an electrical engineer, he develops automated tests to evaluate equipment on the base.

Le is also an active "consultant" for the mousetrap car competition. He conducts clinics at local schools during the fall, then helps to organize and run the regional and national competitions. Last summer he traveled to Tennessee for the 2003 national championship.

"Basically the whole idea of that competition is to expose students to the engineering process," Le says. "I just wanted to give back what I got out of SECME."

ME and SECME program and data systems design manager Angela Birkes addresses a crowd.

New SECME program designed to attract girls
SECME hopes to attract more girls with its new competition programs, including one to design and build model houses. Angela Birkes, a program manager and data systems design manager for SECME, is developing the programs, which will probably begin in Georgia schools. Birkes holds a mechanical engineering degree from Howard University and both a masters and PhD in civil engineering from Georgia Tech. She first heard about SECME during her doctoral studies. Building on her many years as a volunteer tutor for math, science and the SAT, Birkes chose to work full time with SECME.

"I've always wanted my career to be more in outreach and pipeline-building for scientists and technologists," she says.

SECME's challenge is getting pre-college students interested in technical subjects early enough so that they will be ready for a university program. That means working with them as early as possible, Birkes says.

"You definitely need to be on the right track by tenth grade," Birkes says. "Back when I was a kid, we had a mechanical drawing class, something like a graphics class today. The idea is for them to learn some of those concepts early."

SECME and partners mentor pre-K kids
Alondeia Chaney, too, uses her BS in general engineering to turn students toward technical careers. She earned her degree in 1999 through a five-year program at Spelman College/Georgia Tech, where she also earned a minor in mathematics. Chaney began her career at IBM as a technical sales consultant, and then moved to Manhattan Associates, an industrial engineering consulting firm. By 2003 she had changed career paths. During a vacation in the Bahamas, she happened to share a taxi with Dr Yvonne Freeman, executive director of SECME, and while chatting they realized they had a common interest.

Today, Chaney is program director for a new initiative that partners SECME with the Jump Start program, an AmeriCorps-sponsored mentoring initiative with sites around the country. Jump Start targets pre-kindergarten students. "We really want to help them learn their math and science fundamentals early on," says Chaney.

The key to SECME's involvement in the program, says Chaney, is encouraging engineering and science students from local colleges and universities to become volunteer mentors and tutors for these young children.

"We're recruiting college students from Georgia Tech, Spelman and Morehouse. Each student will be paired with a child and foster a relationship with that child throughout the year," Chaney says. "These kids often need that extra attention. We want to make them our success stories."

Cave, Le, Birkes and Chaney all benefited from their early association with SECME. Now they, too, are trying to use SECME's programs and resources to help the next generation of engineers learn the love of science and math as well as the basics at an early age.

D/C

Tom Stabile is a freelance writer in New York, NY.