Since 1974, NACME has awarded over $100 million in scholarships and program support to help underrepresented minority students achieve their dream of an engineering education. NACME’s alumni are the more than 20,000 deserving and talented African American, Latino, and American Indian students who have been NACME Scholars.
Here are some of the success stories of this outstanding group of students.
RayDempsey, BPJosé Gallardo, BoeingReginald DesRoches, Georgia Tech UniversityGalen Madison, ConocoPhillipsVickie Thomas, Coca-Cola
BP
Ray Dempsey is vice president and regional director, Western Hemisphere region, of BP, the international energy company.
Dempsey explains that BP organizes its external relations—government, public affairs, external affairs, and crisis management—into regions. From his office in London, England, Dempsey manages BP’s external relations for the Western Hemisphere.
“I was always a take-it-apart-and-put-it-back-together kind of kid,” says Dempsey, who studied industrial engineering on a NACME scholarship at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. Though he trained as an engineer, Dempsey says he always had his eye on the larger picture, and chose his industrial engineering major with that in mind.
A Leader in a Technical Setting
“What industrial engineering focuses on is efficiency in manufacturing processes and management, essentially. I didn’t want to be an engineer in the purest sense, but I wanted a technical background that would allow me to be a leader in a technical setting,” Dempsey explains.
His 17-year career has given him the opportunity to work in roles that include engineering design, corporate investor relations, human resources, and even three months running a gas station. “In investor relations, I had represented the refining and marketing part of our business and I was intrigued by marketing,” he explains. “So I told my business leader, ‘I’d like to go work in marketing and retail,’ and lo and behold I found myself working in a gas station for the next three months. I have to tell you, there were some days that I wondered, ‘What in the world have I done?’”
Dempsey says his “very meandering path” has given him a solid grasp of the various functions of BP’s operation, and that knowledge helps him do his present job. “My ability now to represent the organization has very much benefited from my career path,” he adds.
Beyond the Moral Commitment
Dempsey says he is “deeply grateful” for the help he received from NACME. “I wasn’t poor,” he says, “but I wasn’t rich, and frankly, every penny mattered.” He believes, however, that the importance of NACME’s mission goes beyond a moral commitment to helping talented people fulfill their goals. Dempsey says the country must increase its recruitment of underrepresented minorities to combat the overall shortage of skilled engineers in the workforce.
“The demographics in the United States are such that children of what we’ve always called minority families will be the majority of the entering workforce in the generations to come,” he says. “This is about ensuring we have a pipeline full of talented people who otherwise would never have thought about engineering as a career.
“If we don’t act, there will be a real crisis. If we don’t change the level of interest that exists today, the country loses, and every company loses. It goes way beyond any kind of moral statement.”
Boeing
“In this field,” says Boeing engineer José Gallardo, “one’s ethnic background does not really matter because we are judged by our performance. I think being Latino may have helped me get my foot in the door here, but once I got in, the rest was up to me.”
Gallardo has made the most of his opportunities. As the engineer responsible for the Delta IV RL10 rocket engine, he says, “I connect with the engine contractor, Pratt & Whitney, on a daily basis to resolve engine issues and failures. Prior to engine delivery to Boeing, we inspect the engine and review the build paper of the entire engine. Once an engine is assigned to a specific mission, I summarize and brief the engine status to Boeing and the Air Force customer.”
Gallardo’s job is rocket science. The RL10 engine is used in the Delta IV rocket to launch satellites and other payloads. Gallardo has also worked on the X-37, “a next-generation vehicle to replace the Space Shuttle. The exciting part was developing entirely new technologies in order to make a lighter, safer, and more efficient vehicle for space exploration.”
Telling It Like It Is
Gallardo says his job combines technical and people skills. “I am very much a problem solver and I work well with others to solve problems. I am able to understand and explain technical issues to others, including management.” He likes being able to get to the core of an issue and communicate what he knows to decision makers.
“I have direct contact with Boeing leaders,” he says, “especially when trying to resolve a flight-critical issue. Many times they want to hear the story directly from the engineers because they tell it like it is, without the spin.”
While Gallardo knows his skills got him where he is today, he also is aware that the opportunity to succeed is still not available to everyone. “I have not experienced any significant challenges as a Latino,” he says, “but it is interesting to notice that in many meetings I am still the only minority in the room.”
Achieving the Dream
Gallardo obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, supported in part by a NACME scholarship. “The experience was very fulfilling from an educational and social perspective,” he says. “I earned my degree in the classroom, had fun participating in the college experience, and made wonderful friends for a lifetime. The NACME scholarship was a big help for me.”
Georgia Tech University
“I certainly keep abreast of what NACME is doing,” says Reginald DesRoches, a former NACME scholar and now associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta. “There are a number of people at NACME headquarters who I’ve come to know through their various conferences.
“One of the impacts that NACME has had on me personally is that I’ve been involved as a faculty member in initiatives to increase the number of underrepresented students who pursue graduate degrees in engineering. I feel that’s very important.”
DesRoches himself began to think of a career in engineering when recruiters from the University of California at Berkeley visited New York City, his home town. “There were recruitment activities among underrepresented high school students in New York by UC Berkeley at that time. I went to a seminar by one of the recruiters and that got me interested in Berkeley and engineering. I was strong in math and science, but I didn’t know much about engineering. Neither of my parents were engineers, so I went into it not knowing much and I learned about it as my career progressed.”
An Academic Career
The more DesRoches learned about engineering, the more he liked it. He completed a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1990, a master’s degree in civil engineering in 1993, and a Ph.D. in structural engineering in 1998, all at UC Berkeley. A NACME scholarship covered about a third of his undergraduate expenses, he says. “It certainly helped quite a bit. I probably would not have been able to make Berkeley work for me without it.”
DesRoches’s research has earned him professional recognition and awards, including a 2002 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the federal government on young engineers and scientists.
Earthquakes and Infrastructure
“My research is focused on studying the effects of earthquakes on built infrastructure, and looking at ways we can make sure these structures perform better when there is an earthquake,” he says. DesRoches’s work is especially concerned with cities in the southeastern United States, where the largest earthquakes in our history occurred in the early 19th century.
The question, he says, is how we can act to protect existing buildings against future quakes. “The cities that are most vulnerable are St. Louis and Memphis, so we’re looking at how we can protect structures in those cities,” DesRoches says.
Improving the Bottom Line
DesRoches is also concerned with protecting gains made in extending diversity in the engineering professions.
“It’s just critical that we try to include as many people as possible in the workforce,” he says, “not only for society as a whole, but for individual companies. Companies should really look toward diversity as a way of improving the bottom line. I think we’ve come a long way, but there’s still a lot more to do.”
ConocoPhillips
Galen Madison has worked for ConocoPhillips, the second-largest oil refiner in the country, his entire career. Madison actually took a job with the company before he finished his degree in civil and environmental engineering at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, but he realized he could not do justice to both the job and school.
“I’d been going to school on a part-time basis and working full time,” he recalls, “but I was struggling to make it work. It was becoming increasingly challenging as my responsibilities continued to grow at the company. So I made the tough decision to go back to school full time. I didn’t know how I was going to fare financially. That’s when I received the NACME grant and that was a big help. I felt very fortunate to have received it.”
A Launching Pad
Madison, a member of the Nez Percé nation, says his NACME scholarship helped him connect with other American Indians at school. “A group of us formed (and I became president of) the chapter of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) there at the university. The NACME support helped me go out and form that AISES chapter. It served as something of a launching pad. There aren’t too many Native American engineering students out there, so our organization wasn’t huge, but we had a lot of fun nonetheless.”
Madison’s gamble on his future paid off as well. ConocoPhillips rehired him when he finished his degree in 1992, and he has played a variety of roles in the company since then, including work in environmental project management, marketing, and pricing.
Foundational Skills
Now Madison is the senior business improver in ConocoPhillips’s U.S. marketing organization. “The good thing about engineering,” Madison says, “is that it gave me the foundational knowledge, capabilities, and credibility within the organization to be able to go and do these different things. Now I’ve not come a complete circle, but I’m again using more of those kinds of foundational, technical skills that more closely relate to engineering.”
As senior business improver, Madison analyzes the marketing organization’s operations using technical management tools that allow him to drive out inefficiencies, reduce defects, and identify opportunities to improve.
Invigorating the Organization
“If a business process is plagued with defects,” Madison says, “it’s like you have this hidden factory going on behind the scenes generating wasted effort and wasted human resources. The idea is that if we can eliminate these defects we can become a much more nimble, responsive organization, which helps our bottom-line profitability.”
Madison takes an engineer’s pride in his ability to fine-tune the business operation’s performance. “I like leading teams and invigorating the organization to achieve improvements,” he says. “We can come up with solutions that are above and beyond what people thought possible.”
Coca-Cola
Vickie Thomas is a project director of the Sparkling Business Unit at one of the world’s major corporations, Coca-Cola. She explains: “It’s about how you develop ideas for your organization, how you take those ideas through the system, and how you prioritize all of the ideas and projects that you have against the resources available to apply to them.
“I am an electrical engineer by training,” Thomas adds, “but this is not an engineering function.” That is not to say that her training is irrelevant to her present career. “Part of what you learn in engineering school is the discipline of problem solving,” Thomas explains. “That’s applicable in a lot of different areas and it’s been invaluable to me.”
Thomas began her career in engineering and, after coming to Coca-Cola in the mid-1990s, continued as an engineer, managing installation of control systems and power distribution systems in Coca-Cola manufacturing plants. She later became involved in the design of Coca-Cola fountain equipment. “After that,” Thomas says, “I started migrating into different roles, leveraging the engineering background.”
Moving into Management
Thomas earned a master’s degree in business administration from Georgia State University in Atlanta earlier in her career. At Coca-Cola, she used marketing skills acquired in her MBA studies as a manager of Coca-Cola’s brand equity in its fountain equipment, and eventually moved into her present management role.
Thomas says her expanded duties have given her a better understanding of the value of diversity. “It wasn’t until I got my first job outside engineering that I heard somebody say, ‘You think like an engineer.’ I really didn’t know what that meant. From an engineering perspective, you say, ‘Is there any other way to think?’ But after a while I realized engineers do think differently—we’re systematic, very analytical, very logical.”
Different People, Different Mind-sets
Thomas’s present job requires that she work across disciplines. “I work with engineers, the marketing folks, the finance folks—it’s a cross-functional group of people,” she says. “I think what helps me is that, because I’ve done so many different things, I can relate to a lot of different people and a lot of different mind-sets. You really have to learn to appreciate the other ways of thinking because everything can’t be laid down in the engineering way. I think that’s the growth I’ve gone through in my nonengineering roles.”
Support from family, friends, and NACME helped Thomas develop her career. She says, however, that even some of her strongest supporters had to grow a bit in response to her ambitions. “My father has always been supportive of all my choices,” she adds, “but when I told him what I wanted to be, his first reaction was, ‘Girls can’t be engineers!’”
An Investment in the Future
Thomas says her NACME scholarship was critical in helping her meet the challenges of engineering studies at Georgia Tech. “Engineering school is very difficult,” she says. “I was 17 when I went to college, trying to grow up and take care of myself, and money issues are just problems piled on top of all the other things you’re dealing with. To be able to free someone up so they can spend more time learning and becoming the best engineer they can be, that’s just invaluable.”
Thomas says donors to NACME are making an investment in the future. “I don’t think you can really tell the value that you’re getting in return,” she says, “because you’re changing somebody’s life.”