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The job market is hot for all engineering disciplines, particularly electrical, says Dr Michael Smith, director of programs for NSBE (www.nsbe.org), the African American-focused engineering society. A shortage of African Americans in technical fields has companies scrambling to create programs to spur interest in math and science among young people, and to boost career advancement programs for their employees.
"As long as we have PDAs, laptops and similar tools, job opportunities for electrical engineers will grow," Smith says.
Senior-level human resource execs agree that EE is wide open right now for African Americans seeking employment. Companies are working hard to bolster relationships and recruiting efforts with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and networking groups like NSBE and SWE (www.swe.org).
Steve Jarrett is the vice president of HR for integrated technology delivery at IBM (Armonk, NY) and is African American. He says U.S. companies are hungry for EE graduates, especially African Americans. IBM is ramping up its recruiting efforts, even sending reps to knock on doors in cities like Philadelphia and Detroit with information about technology careers. It's also sending young engineers and IT professionals to middle schools so that students can hear about their successes firsthand.
"We need to see more African American EE majors," Jarrett says. "In the United States there's been a decline in the number of overall students who have expressed an interest in engineering, so you can imagine there's been a similar decrease among black candidates.
"There's a ton of work to be done. It's a major problem for the entire country, and it's something that we at IBM are passionate about. We have a host of academic initiatives designed to encourage colleges and high schools to increase their math and science focus."
Offering a head start at Cat
Sonya Miles, global diversity manager at Caterpillar Inc (Peoria, IL), says the company has a number of programs in place in which employees work with children from middle school to high school to spur interest in science and technology. "The earlier we can create an interest in EE, the better."
Joel Howell, an EE in business development at Harris Corp (Melbourne, FL), volunteered at community summer camps during his college years and worked with a lot of African American children. He says many youngsters dream of exciting careers like medicine, law, math, science and engineering.
"But something happens between elementary school and when they're ready to graduate from high school. When they're young, they all want to make a difference in their communities. But in my home state, Florida, the graduation rates are less than 70 percent," Howell says.
"Many people are working hard to provide opportunities for our children, but we all have to do a better job in the middle and high schools to make sure kids are encouraged to continue their education. We have to start capturing their interest in different ways beyond just telling them to open up their textbooks."
How companies support diversity
Companies seem to be doing a good job in supporting African American employees in their career development. Howell and other engineers say they have found a wealth of support as well as a vast array of career options, from working on deep space exploration at NASA to keeping the lights on in Baltimore.
Caterpillar is working hard to diversify its overall workforce, says Miles. Cat works closely with NSBE and about a dozen HBCUs to attract and retain African American employees. It also offers employee affinity groups, including the African American Network, which is based in Illinois and has 200 members.
IBM has nearly thirty African American affinity groups across the country, and a unique program called the Electronic Welcome Wagon pairs upper-level executives with new African American hires for the first two months of their employment. The company recruits from about twenty HBCUs that have significant engineering and computer programs. Its diversity campus executive program enables high-ranking African American IBM executives to work with top-level HBCU staff. "We do everything from curriculum development to IT solutions," Jarrett says.
At Johnson & Johnson (New Brunswick, NJ), mentoring programs are available for all engineers. The company also offers a variety of affinity groups that support diverse employees, including an African American Leadership Council. It also taps groups like NSBE and SWE.
Here are some African Americans who have found success in a diverse workplace. They're proof that there are exciting careers in EE.
Da'Janel Roberts: resolving customer issues at Baltimore Gas & Electric
Da'Janel Roberts has found her niche at Constellation Energy Group, the holding company of Baltimore Gas & Electric Co (Baltimore, MD). "It's important to decide whether your values fit with a corporate culture. Here it all fits together," Roberts says.
She has already had some exciting opportunities at Constellation. She joined the company in February 2005 as an associate engineer, and for her first year she managed the company's underground cable replacement program. Almost sixty percent of the utility's electricity feeders are underground cables rather than overhead conductors. Roberts had to analyze problems, monitor process metrics and issue construction repair orders. She was promoted to full engineer status in July 2005.
She moved to her current job in customer reliability management in January 2006, but two weeks later she was assigned to a special team to work on the pending merger between Constellation and Florida Power & Light Group. She traveled to Florida to help the two companies put together a best-practices plan.
"It's not far-fetched in the utility industry to share ideas on the things you're doing well. We work as a family," Roberts says.
When the team wrapped up its work in May, she went back to her role in customer reliability management. Her job is to oversee four technical staffers who provide solutions to day-to-day system issues. Those can be as simple as summer voltage drops, or as complex as relocating power lines for new home construction. There's a lot of field work, which she enjoys.
"Every customer issue is unique, so I'm able to be creative in solving problems. I enjoy exercising my critical thinking skills," Roberts says.
Roberts received her BS in physics in 2000 from Xavier University, an HBCU in New Orleans. Xavier's program offers a science degree in three years and the opportunity to enter an engineering program as a junior. Roberts got her BSEE from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA) in 2002.
In 1998, while she was at Xavier, she interned for the U. S. General Services Administration in Chicago, testing sites for asbestos levels. In 2000 she interned with NCR Corp in Duluth, GA, designing computer systems for kiosks in department stores and malls.
Her first job immediately after graduation was with a Chicago construction firm as a project engineer, but she didn't have much chance to use her EE skills. She's found the job she always wanted at Baltimore Gas & Electric. "I'm interested in constantly developing myself, and wanted an environment where you're encouraged to apply your educational achievements. That wasn't the case in my other job. Here, it is. It makes a big difference," she says.
Boeing's Tyria Riley works on electronic databases
Put Tyria Riley on an airplane, and she can tell you the ins and outs of its electrical systems. She oversees a database that tracks the electrical wiring of an entire aircraft. She works in a St. Louis, MO design and manufacturing facility for Boeing (Seattle, WA). She's moved up quickly since she joined the company in October 2003.
Her first four months were spent as an electrical installations design engineer. She supported the F-18/F program, changing clamps, routing wires and more, then documenting the changes. In February 2004 she moved to the flight instrumentation group, where she updated drawings and designed telemetry for the ground support unit, a huge computer simulator that tests aircraft before they take off.
In January 2005 she moved to her current job with the common electrical/electronic database systems (CEEDS) core team. CEEDS is a tool that stores and manages Boeing's electrical schematics and program interfaces.
Growing up, Riley sometimes exasperated her mother by taking apart the VCR and reassembling it. Today her parents are proud of her career accomplishments. "Now they don't mind me taking things apart!" she laughs.
She received her BSEE from Southern Illinois University (Edwardsville, IL) in August 2002. Her first college internship was with the Illinois Department of Transportation in the summer of 2000. She worked in Collinsville, repairing traffic signals and capacitors.
Her second internship was with Illinois Power the following summer. She worked in Decatur and surveyed the Springfield area to make sure that transformers were properly hooked to power lines. She kept records so that the power company could remove transformers that were not being used.
For the first five months after graduation she worked as a contract engineer for Coin Acceptors (Ladue, MO). "The job market was tight at the time," she says, adding that when the contract finished, it was several months before she found her position at Boeing.
Her advice to college students is to be patient when seeking that first job. "Sometimes you have to take something temporary," she says. "Just keep looking until you get the job you want."
Marquell Titus: senior associate engineer for Caterpillar
After four college internships at various companies and a year in a rotational program at Caterpillar Inc (Peoria, IL), EE Marquell Titus found her home in Caterpillar's Forest Products Group, based in LaGrange, GA. Caterpillar designs and manufactures construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, and industrial gas turbines.
Since March Titus has been working as a senior associate engineer, responsible for electrical applications during the manufacturing process of forestry machines. Her job involves collaborating with engineers in Illinois on new designs or changes to specific design plans, and then monitoring the effects on the machines being assembled.
"The engineers may require specific information or data, or need me to look at the product and determine that what they're seeing on their screens matches what's on the machine. I have to be knowledgeable about the manufacturing equipment and the products," she says.
The mom of a six-year-old son, Titus believes strongly in mentoring youngsters. Through the company's Partners in Education program, she is a volunteer tutor at local elementary and high schools and works closely with guidance counselors to help students get on track with their studies. Her hope is that more children will consider math and science careers in the future.
"I like to encourage them and let them know that no matter your ethnic background, you can be anything that you want to be," she says.
Titus grew up in Colorado and always had a healthy interest in fixing things. "My mom often asked me to put electronic things together," Titus says. Her godmother, an electrical engineer at Lockheed Martin, encouraged her to enter the field.
She received her BSEE in 2002 from Tuskegee University (Tuskegee, AL). She expects to finish her Tuskegee masters thesis this December.
She interned in the Brighton, MI power train division of General Motors in the summer of 2000. She handled unit testing, code writing and design of air conditioning systems. In the summer of 2002 she went to the Kalluri Group (Houston, TX), a private engineering firm, and worked on design and testing.
She did consecutive internships with Caterpillar in the summer and fall of 2004 while she was working on her masters. She was assigned to the group where she currently has a full-time job. "I had the opportunity to learn about the product, decipher anything that was wrong with it and, if there was a better solution, find it," she says.
The company extended her an offer to begin its fifteen-month rotational program in January 2005. When the rotations were over she went back to the forestry group and has been there ever since. "There were other options, but I really wanted to be here. I enjoy what I do," Titus says.
She particularly likes working directly with the machines to see how they operate. She also isn't shy about asking questions. She's found that her supervisor and career coach Phillip Alexander and her Tuskegee recruiter Walt Williams have been especially helpful. Titus has also learned a lot from Maurice Rosser, a safety manager who took her under his wing during her internships. "It's great just to have someone you can confide in and trust, and who knows the ins and outs of the corporation," she says.
Joel Howell applies his engineering knowhow at Harris Corp
Joel Howell is one of the people looking at how NASA will get to Mars or the Moon. Howell's job is to win important NASA projects for Harris Corp (Melbourne, FL), an international communications and IT company that serves government and commercial clients. Of its 13,000 employees, 5,500 are engineers and scientists.
Howell's focus is communication systems for NASA spacecraft. "NASA researchers are expanding the boundaries of science," he notes. "So you have to have a strong science and engineering background when you work with them, especially when you're trying to help solve tough engineering problems."
Howell graduated in May 2003 from the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL) with a BSEE, and started at Harris that August. Most of his time is spent on the road with customers.
"I work closely with the engineering team on our proposals," Howell says. "Then we typically meet with managers or chief scientists to discuss how exactly we're going to communicate with the next generation rover on Mars or how a spacecraft is supposed to orbit the moon or a planet."
Howell originally considered a degree in archaeology or architecture, but during his childhood in the mid-90s, the computer craze took hold of him. "I was a child of the technology boom," he says.
During his first two college summers, in 1999 and 2000, he interned with Lockheed Martin's information systems group in Orlando, FL. He worked on an integrated automated fingerprint identification system for the FBI, a program that involved transferring paper records of fingerprints to an electronic database. He was on a team that wrote programs to test the system.
"The good thing about interning early in college is that you get industry experience right away, and money in your bank account. I could make educated decisions about my area of focus, and I was still able to study abroad and get involved in student organizations," he says.
During his last two summers he concentrated on community service activities. After graduation he turned to Harris because he perceived it took good care of its employees. His hunch was right. "A lot of other companies wanted to throw me right into the fire, but Harris lined me up with training. I have two official mentors that I can go to any time for advice on my career or my life," he says.
To do his job well, Howell has to be a self-starter with an entrepreneurial personality. "In my internships I realized that although I was technically sound and did well academically, I wanted to be on the front end of technology," he says.
"On the business side, you can sell the ideas, so that's what I'm trying to do now: advocate for technology and engineering to make the world a better place."
IBM's Kory Bennett designs PowerPC circuits
Kory Bennett is a circuit design engineer in IBM's systems and technology group (Research Triangle Park, NC). This development organization handles PowerPC microprocessors that are geared toward the server market. Bennet either helps develop designs from scratch or improves existing ones.
"It's a very challenging job, and I enjoy the privilege of being in a group that is involved in leading-edge technology," Bennett says. "The fast pace keeps you interested and requires you to stay on your toes. Some people might think it's stressful, but I enjoy it."
Bennett works on a team of engineers based in Raleigh, NC, and Austin, TX. They design the chips and then hand over the templates to one of IBM's manufacturing facilities. He's happy that the technology and tools can change "even as you're in the process of designing. I'm constantly learning, which is great."
Bennett admits that it took awhile for him to find a job he loves. He graduated in 1992 from Temple University (Philadelphia, PA) with a BSEE, and then worked as a quality assurance engineer at a nuclear energy plant called Indian Point 3 (Buchanan, NY). He didn't enjoy it, so he went back to school in 1994 for his MSEE and graduated in 1996 from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (NC A&T, Greensboro, NC).
He worked for the next five years in the semiconductor industry in Austin, TX, working for Motorola and Cirrus Logic. At Cirrus he made the transition from logic design to circuit design. "You need a different set of technical skills when you're designing a chip," he says.
He headed back to NC A&T for his doctorate in electrical and computer engineering in 2002 and recently finished the four-year program. His thesis was on a methodology for high speed asynchronous system design using input data distribution.
As a grad student, Bennett had internships at IBM and NASA. At IBM he worked on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) with some hardcore logic. "Usually FPGAs are fully programmable, but IBM was working on putting some custom circuits inside it," Bennett says.
At NASA he worked in the Langley Aerospace Research Summer Scholars Program (Hampton, VA), focusing on charge-coupled devices (CCD) for image sensors. Each circuit contains an array of linked light-sensitive capacitors. With the help of an external circuit, each capacitor can transfer its electrical charge to other local capacitors. CCDs are used in applications like digital photography and astronomy.
After he received his doctorate IBM offered him a job. He's found a strong support system at IBM that includes an African American networking group and two mentors. "You have to be humble and take advice from people who have been around," he says. "I like to make sure that before I make career decisions, I get as much information as possible."
Taneh Worjoloh works in Intel's enterprise microprocessor group
The environment at Intel (Santa Clara, CA) is one of constant learning and change, says Taneh Worjoloh, a rotation engineer at the company's facility in Santa Clara, CA.
"The people at Intel want you to be motivated, improve your skills and move around," Worjoloh says. "When you talk to senior people, you find out that they held five different jobs in twelve years. They want you to have depth and knowledge, and that comes from being aware of what's around you."
Worjoloh is currently doing the second of three rotations in a program she started in October 2005. She graduated from Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) in January 2005 with a degree in electrical and computer engineering. Initially she wanted to find a job on the East Coast, because her parents live in North Carolina, but after months of job hunting it became apparent that the best opportunities were in the West, she says. She will be able to interview for a full-time position at Intel after she completes her third rotation later this year.
Worjoloh interned during college at the facility where she now works. At that time she was in the optical proximity correction group doing chip design.
Her second internship was at a telecom network operations center in New Jersey, but it was not as interesting, she says. Technicians would call into the center by routing through the alarm system to ensure that nothing was wrong with the cellular towers. "I took alarm tests all day," Worjoloh says.
Worjoloh has been happy so far with both of her rotational jobs at Intel. The first was with the corporate technologies group. She worked in the microprocessor research lab, doing applications research. Her job was to check a product's performance on different machines and make sure it was portable to any of the simulators involved with the next level of computing. "In general, once the algorithm is in place, it's all about making sure it can do anything you want it to do," she says.
Her second rotation, also in Santa Clara, is in the enterprise microprocessor group, which handles the development of processors. Here, Worjoloh is a validation engineer. She looks at microprocessor models and takes them through tests to find their limitations and what needs to be done to make them more robust, she explains.
She has enjoyed the support she's had from senior-level employees, and the corporate culture, which is very open. "I think it's unique here. You know what's going on at a higher level. You go to business meetings and are updated on what the competition is doing. It's a big-picture type thing."
Alisha McClinton: from intern to full-timer at Centocor
African Americans aren't common in Ireland, but Alisha McClinton has enjoyed working there for Centocor (Horsham, PA), a Johnson & Johnson company. She's part of a growing team overseeing the planning and construction of a biotechnology plant for Centocor Biologics (Ireland) Ltd in the city of Cork. She's just finishing the first year of a three-year assignment.
"It's interesting overseas, because they see me first as an American, not an African American," McClinton says. "They joke with us about our accents more than the color of our skin."
As a process engineer, McClinton is outfitting two of the suites in the process building with manufacturing equipment. "You start with a concept that goes through many design reviews. We work closely with the people who will be the final owners of the system after we leave. Together, we arrive at a design that's approved for construction. Then the process equipment is fabricated, tested and shipped to the site for integration with the building," she says.
McClinton is a self-described "fast-running nerd." She had a full track and field scholarship at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA), where she majored in EE. "Georgia Tech was the perfect fit for me, both in the classroom and on the track," McClinton says.
The university had a special campus recruiting program that catered to student athletes and their demanding competition and travel schedules. That's how J&J found McClinton. She did two summer internships with the corporation's consumer products company in Skillman, NJ in 2000 and 2001. The first summer she helped design and build an electrical control panel for a piece of manufacturing equipment. "It had to be both safe and efficient," she explains. The second summer she programmed a robotic female midsection that tested tampons.
J&J offered her a place in its Engineering Leadership Development Program (ELDP) when she graduated in 2002. The ELDP, which started in 2002, is currently being phased out and will be folded into a new initiative called Global Operations Leadership Development (GOLD), a broad-based program that includes engineering, operations and quality disciplines. "It's not just for engineers. Business majors can participate too," explains George Weaver, director of ELDP.
McClinton went through three rotations for the program: the first, at Consumer Products, was with the group where she had interned; the second was at the Splenda plant in McIntosh, AL; and the third rotation was at Ethicon (Sommerville, NJ), in the process optimization group. "At Ethicon, I took existing manufacturing processes and used techniques to get more out of them," she says. Her current job became available after she finished that rotation.
"I'm not sure at the moment if I'll end up staying overseas," McClinton says. "I know I'll be ready to come home for a bit at the end of this assignment. It's difficult to be anywhere without your family and friends."
Chris Collins does satellite research for Sandia
Chris Collins is in the communications systems group at Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque, NM). He works on a satellite-based project that involves investigating the feasibility of converting analog signals to digital signals and transmitting them to a ground station. "With this project you have to know about digital communications technologies like analog-to-digital converters, modulation techniques, error correction coding and link budget analysis, basically how to get the data from the satellite to the ground," he explains.
"We typically work on projects that change every two to three years," Collins adds. "They're research-based projects and we're often working on cutting-edge technology."
He's been in the same department since he was hired in 2001 for the lab's One Year On Campus (OYOC) program. Under OYOC, students intern for a summer and then head off to graduate school at a top university. "You go to school full time, while Sandia pays all of your tuition and gives you a stipend. After you finish grad school, you come back to a full-time job," says Collins. He earned his MSEE from New Mexico State University (Las Cruces, NM) in December 2003.
Collins found the opportunity through a recruiter who was an alumnus of his school, Prairie View A&M University (Prairie View, TX), an HBCU about fifty miles northwest of Houston. He started with an associates degree in engineering from Austin Community College (Austin, TX), then received his BSEE from Prairie View in December 2001.
Collins learned about engineering in high school. He participated in a management internship program sponsored by the applied research laboratories of the University of Texas-Austin, going to school in the morning and to his internship in the afternoon.
He continued interning there during the summers. In the beginning he ran electromagnetic simulations to predict atmospheric effects that impact communication signals.
The summer before his sophomore year he got into system administration work when he set up a computer lab and ran computer simulations at the applied research labs at Pennsylvania State University (State College, PA). The next summer he worked at Penn on a project for the U.S. Army, simulating how communication signals travel over different terrains.
The summer before his senior year he interned at Boeing Satellite Systems (El Segundo, CA). "I started off doing analysis for Thuraya, a mobile telephone satellite system over the United Arab Emirates. We did link budget analysis to characterize gains and losses, transmit and receive power, data rates and free-space losses," he says.
Sandia has been so supportive that his mentor, Bob Axline, an engineer and a distinguished member of technical staff, came to Collins' masters graduation ceremony. Collins wants to be there for others in the same way, and participates in a summer program at the Albuquerque National American University (www.national.edu) called Hands-on, Minds-on Technology. The program offers courses like physics, math, crime scene investigation and robotics to African American and other minority middle- and high-school students. Engineers and scientists from Sandia volunteer each Saturday to teach and promote careers in math and science.
"We need to continue to encourage African American youth to go to college and get degrees, not just degrees in general but in math and science, because we're not represented enough in the engineering or computer science fields," says Collins, who is a first generation college student himself. "They need mentors telling them that they can do it and encouraging them to earn technical degrees."
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