2021 GlobalMindED
The Future of Work is Diverse, Inclusive, Just and Equitable
GlobalMindED closes the equity gap by creating a capable, diverse talent pipeline through connections to role models, mentors, internships for low-income students, returning adults, First Gen to college and inclusive leaders who teach them, work with them and hire them.
|
|
Dr. Kenneth Connor is an outstanding example of a student-centered faculty member who himself was inspired as a learner by mentors, peers and his own self-guided tinkering. Read his arc-of-time story below and see first-hand the passion that can show up in a young child and influence an entire lifetime of purpose and contribution. There are more wonderful stories on his website. His focus now, the Inclusive Engineering Consortium, is dedicated to opening up the opportunities he has had as a white male to all leaders of color from all backgrounds. We are inspired by the generosity of his heart and by life lessons he has created every step of the way- a STEM Star in full brilliance.
Below is some of the most high impact DEI content you can find. Please share it with your networks and spread the inclusive movement until we have worldwide habits of respect, acceptance and appreciation of difference.
All GlobalMindED DEI events are on our YouTube channel. International Month of Women events:
|
|
I am now retired from a long and happy career as an engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. I had a great time teaching and doing research at RPI, which was founded in 1824 to promote the "application of science to the common purposes of life." One of my most important tasks as a professor was advising students, especially undergrads. Even at a tech school, where students almost all pursue careers in STEM, most students are at least somewhat uncertain about their particular choice of major and quite uncertain about their choice of subspecialty within their major. I always felt like a bit of a fraud when talking to students about their career choice, because I have known what I wanted to be for a long time. I decided to be an electrical or electronics engineer in 6th grade and a professor of electrical engineering while I was still in high school. The story of how I came to these decisions may contain some useful lessons for anyone who hopes to select the best possible career path. I know that what I did worked for me. Maybe it can work for you too. |
|
Before I get into my story, here is a little background on my family. Until my parents’ generation, all of my ancestors were farmers. My mother’s Norwegian/Danish parents were dairy farmers about 10 miles from where I grew up in Madison, WI. My fathers’s German/Irish parents were pig and cattle farmers near Armour, SD. Both of his parents died in Spanish Flu Pandemic right after World War I (1919). He was two weeks old. That was the first time he was orphaned. He was taken to a small town near Madison and raised by his mother’s parents. He was orphaned again in 10th grade, when his grandfather died in 1935. He did not finish high school but became a pattern maker in a gray iron foundry in 1940, eventually moving up to foundry superintendent in the 50s. My mother was an RN, who was trained at a hospital in Milwaukee, completing her studies in 1942. They both grew up during the Great Depression. In ‘43, my parents got married, my dad joined the Navy and my elder brother was born. In 1946, my parents restarted their family when my father returned from the war. Like others born at the leading edge of the baby boom, I arrived as soon as biology would permit, in late summer. |
|
Growing up, we did not have a lot of money, but my parents were both excellent problem solvers and had many practical skills. My dad built our house, with a bit of help from an uncle or two. My mother was an amazing gardener and cook. We were close enough to my grandparents’ farm that I could spend a good fraction of each year there learning the rudiments of farming, including machinery operation and maintenance. By 6th grade, I had demonstrated good math skills, so some family, friends and neighbors began suggesting that I should become an engineer. About the same time I started tinkering with electronics, particularly radios. Thus, at the age of 11, I decided to become an electronics engineer. You might think that I must have been very smart because that is basically what I am today, almost 64 years later. However, that was also the year my best friend and I made the brilliant decision that we could be paratroopers and jump off of his garage roof with a regular size umbrella serving as our parachute. That was not enough of a challenge, so I moved up to a very tall step ladder and broke three toes on my left foot. The photo above shows me with my brothers and some of my cousins. I am the one sitting in the chair with a cast on my left foot. |
|
It was somewhat surprising that I got so much advice to become an engineer, because I only knew one engineer and he was a civil engineer who worked for the city. However, 6th grade was quite the remarkable year for science and technology. The first manmade satellite (Sputnik) was launched into earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957. This occurred right in the middle of the baseball World Series between my beloved Milwaukee Braves (the Braves moved from Boston in 1953 and then to Atlanta in 1966), who were busy beating the New York Yankees. I was definitely in sensory overload trying to follow Sputnik in the sky and on my radio while also trying to listen to every second of every ballgame. All of my closest friends wanted to do something to help with the space race. (Watch the film October Sky to get a sense of what the time was like.) The Russian government recently named its COVID vaccine ‘Sputnik,’ in honor of their great Cold War accomplishment in 1957.
In addition to Sputnik, there was also the International Geophysical Year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Geophysical_Year) which ran from 1 July 1957 to 31 December 1958. IGY was an effort to coordinate the collection of geophysical data from around the world, with nearly every country participating in some way. It built on recent advances in rocketry, radar, and computing. Shown below is a newspaper clipping for the science fair we held in our class that year as our small part in this great effort. If you look very carefully, you will see the letters ‘IGY’ written on the back wall of our classroom in the upper right photo. You do not have to look very carefully at all to also see that, at that time, science was seen as something men did, not women. In all of the photos, it is the boy actively demonstrating his experiment while the girls watch. I am in the lower left showing my mockup of a nuclear reactor that I built using my elder brother's model steam engine.
|
|
The launch of Sputnik had a huge impact on US education in general and my education, specifically. It was decided that math and science education had to be enhanced to better prepare students to be scientists and engineers. There are many references on this issue
(https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/10/how-sputnik-changed-u-s-education/). In my case, I was one of four students from my elementary school class, chosen to receive accelerated science and math in junior high school. They compressed 7th and 8th grade subjects into one year and started us on the high school sequence in 8th grade. That made room for calculus and advanced science in 12th grade. Taking this enhanced math and science sequence reinforced my desire to be an engineer because I found these subjects both challenging and fun to learn. I also continued my tinkering with electronics and started collecting antique audio equipment and radios. I never got formally into amateur radio, but did have about a dozen shortwave receivers in my collection. Nearly everything I collected was someone else’s junk, so mostly free.
|
|
Lessons Learned: Mentors play a very important role in developing one’s long term plans. In my case, I had quite a variety of mentors, some of whom worked from data like standardized tests, which can be inadequate or misleading, so should always be combined with other information. At that time, such tests were thought to be quite accurate, which we know now is not really the case. Fortunately, I continued to think about the advice I had gotten and the decisions I was making in light of my personal experiences with math and electronics and the advice I got from more informal mentors. Continuous re-evaluation of one’s plans is absolutely necessary. The opportunities I was given by being selected for accelerated programs came along at exactly the right time for me. I was just finishing 6th grade and was in the vanguard of a remarkable new program. Such opportunities are rare in life, but when they occur, they should be taken advantage of. This also taught me to look for other opportunities that can make my personal education even better. I was very lucky to be born at the right time and place. Cold War events gave me a particularly effective kick start to my eventual career.
|
|
While I was a junior in high school, I found some information on summer science programs supported by the National Science Foundation. I applied to several and was accepted to one in Michigan which met for six weeks, partly in Grand Rapids and partly in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. The guidance counselors at my school were of little help in this process, but they did provide the necessary information on my grades and class standing. My parents were supportive but also had no idea how to help other than agreeing that I could go and driving me to and from Michigan. This summer program had the inspiring title of Honors Institute for Young Scientists and involved coursework in math, physics and chemistry, with each student majoring in one and minoring in the other two. My major was math, with courses taught by an amazing teacher from St Louis - LeRoy Sachs.
The best thing about this experience was getting to know and hanging out with smart kids, mostly from Michigan but with other states also represented, who were anxious to share their personal passions. We formed study groups so we could get our homework done quickly and leave time for socializing. To our surprise, we also found out that we learned better this way. This was my first experience learning effectively from my peers, with our group generally performing near the top of our classes. Learning with other students, away from formal classes, became part of our social fabric, which is one of the reasons why I came to emphasize teamwork in the classes I taught at RPI.
|
|
The most significant impact on my professional plans occurred in Ann Arbor, where many of the lectures were presented by electrical engineering professors. This was the first time I had met anyone with this job and the chance to talk to them showed me exactly the kind of electrical engineer I wanted to be because they got to solve really interesting problems with math and science. Thus, at the age of 16, I decided that I wanted to be a professor of electrical engineering. As with my original decision to become an electrical or electronics engineer, I was still largely ignorant of what that actually meant. I thought, for example, that this would give me summers off, which never happened. Fortunately, I understood that I did not know exactly what I would be getting into, so I regularly updated and got more specific about my plans throughout my remaining education. Ironically, my goal of becoming a professor was accompanied by another medical incident. I had borrowed a bicycle from one of my classmates so I could more easily explore the Grand Rapids area throughout the summer. While riding it one day, I decided to race a bus to the next corner, but the chain came off and I smashed my right foot into the ground, tearing some tendons. At least I did not break it this time, but I was on crutches for the next three weeks, including the day they took our group photo, shown below. I am located to the far left, in the shadow, so I have expanded that part of the image. I think they made me stand there so they were not memorializing the fact that it was possible to get hurt while participating in their program. |
|
Lessons Learned: Be ready for opportunities, particularly ones that force you out of your comfort zone. Also, going away and working with great students provides a calibration one cannot get at home. The HIFYS experience greatly increased my self confidence and made me even more willing to try new things. So much so that I even ran for senior class president, an election I fortunately lost, since I would now have to organize our regular class reunions. It was a three way race, but one of the candidates was the quarterback of the football team, so his win was a foregone conclusion. My friends and I had great fun coming up with my platform and making posters and handouts, but most of our materials were confiscated by my history teacher for being inappropriate. We had pushed the good taste envelope a bit to get people’s attention.
|
|
In addition to working on my grandparents’ farm, I had many part-time jobs throughout my student years. I babysat and did yard work for neighbors, was a library page, delivered newspapers, sold food at University of Wisconsin sporting events, and worked in the produce department of a supermarket. This latter job paid well because the stores were unionized by the Retail Clerks International.
Lessons Learned: I learned from all of these jobs, especially farmwork, that being an electrical engineer looked much better. I also realized that new jobs were fun to learn to do well and I could probably do any kind of work I was asked to do, as long as I was not going to have to do it forever.
For college, I attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison for my first two electrical engineering (EE) degrees. It was not my first choice to stay in my hometown, but my father could not see the point of going elsewhere when the UW was such a terrific school and I could live at home. He was definitely a child of the Great Depression and careful with his money. The company he worked for gave me a $300 a year scholarship, which was enough to pay my fees and buy my books. (Hard to believe, isn’t it, but there was no tuition for in-state students at that time.) Thus, I could get a great education for nothing.
I continued to work weekends at the supermarket for most of my first year. When planning for summer, I thought I should look for a job that was quite different from my plan to be an engineer as a test to see if I was on the right path, so I found a job selling encyclopedias. That did not last, because it required keeping the real cost of the books from buyers. We were told by our bosses to remember that the people we were selling to made the Beverly Hillbillies the most popular show on TV and could be easily fooled. I then worked for a very poorly managed factory that canned vegetables like corn and peas. Both of these jobs challenged my conclusion that I could do any job well as long as it was temporary. There were indeed jobs that were not worth doing. Fortunately, my old Retail Clerks union was trying to organize a chain of department stores and needed pickets. Being a professional picket was both exceptionally boring and great fun. We were required by law to keep moving at all times and not block anyone’s access to the store. However, there were always people who wanted to argue with us and call us communists. We also got paid union scale, so we made more than any of the store employees, except their manager. That job continued into the fall. The following summer, I worked for my father at the foundry he helped run. As an orphan, he was very much against nepotism, so he had a personal policy of not hiring family members. However, that year he changed his mind and hired me as a laborer. The pay was good because the shop was also unionized (United Steel Workers) so I was a member of my second union. Even though he gave me all of the dirtiest jobs to do, I enjoyed my summer because I got to meet a lot of interesting people and saw how their production processes worked. Later, as a junior and senior, I had my only other nontechnical job in one of the university gyms.
Lessons Learned: There were jobs that were not worth doing, but I liked taking some responsibility for my own financial support. By working for my father, I was able to earn enough money for an apartment I shared with three friends. Thus, I was able to finally move on campus and enjoy more of the total student experience. I was also able to purchase a small motor scooter so I finally had my own transportation. The jobs I had did add to my general skill set, but, since they were not technical, I knew that, in the future I needed to find jobs that also helped me be a better electrical engineer. This is a lesson I have found is appreciated by most people working in engineering education. There are a lot of students these days who must work while in school. This is especially the case in Minority Serving Institutions like Historically Black Colleges (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions. Unfortunately, most students can only find non-technical jobs. Some of my colleagues and I are trying to develop programs that substantially increase opportunities for STEM students to find technical jobs that are more directly beneficial for their education and usually pay better, which should have a very positive impact on retention and graduation at MSIs.
Outside of the classroom, I was able to add to my engineering education three different ways. I worked part-time in a lab assisting a graduate student with his research, I was active as an officer of HKN (the EE honor society), and I spent my final undergraduate summer as an engineering trainee at John Deere Dubuque Tractor Works. I highly recommend such activities because they help with motivation and allow one to explore what the future will bring. Being a university professor requires contributions as a teacher, a researcher and in service to the university and the technical profession. Being an HKN or IEEE (the EE professional society) student officer is an excellent opportunity to see what this kind of service is like. In my case, this helped me get better acquainted with electrical engineering faculty and to better appreciate how my future profession can impact society. To help our fellow students make good choices for graduate school, we published a newsletter that included writeups by faculty on their research and articles on societal issues. We got involved in the environmental movement and civil rights. The latter effort was the beginning of what has become my lifelong commitment to diversity in engineering. Until that time, I had not seen how my political and professional interests were so coupled. One of the articles I wrote for our newsletter in response to the report from the Kerner Commission, was also published in the campus newspaper. I recently wrote an update on this experience from my perspective today for the ECE Department Heads Association newsletter. https://www.ecedha.org/ECE-Resources/ECE-Source-eNewsletter/October-2020/Self-Interest Since retiring from RPI, I have worked almost exclusively to build a new organization - The Inclusive Engineering Consortium - a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing together academia, industry, and government to increase the quantity and quality of African-American, Hispanic and Native American Electrical and Computer Engineering graduates. (https://www.iec.org/)
I got my job at John Deere in the summer between my junior and senior years to see what it was like to be a bachelors degree level engineer. I did not think it made sense to just continue on to grad school and a job as a professor if I did not understand a more traditional choice. It did indeed confirm that I did not want such a job, but it was an even more beneficial experience in other ways. First, it confirmed my philosophy of learning to do any job well, whether or not it was on my chosen path. The first task I was given that summer was to collect information on the plant electrical system, making sure documentation was up to date and the system was working as it was supposed to. Over the years, many changes had taken place that were not fully documented. I learned that the same task had been given to the last two EE summer students, but they were not able to complete it. I figured out how to finish it in about a month. When all trainees met midsummer for a status meeting, before we were to go to corporate headquarters for a few days, we were all asked how we were doing so far. When it came to me, I said that, based on my experiences so far, I did not see a future at John Deere. I had finished what I was to do over the summer and was not finding the work to be sufficiently challenging or interesting. The boss asked around the table to see if any of the other engineers had something better for me to do and my assignment was switched to the R&D group developing their first front end loader. The rest of my summer was great.
Lessons Learned: From this experience I learned to constructively push back when given a job that was not making good use of my talents. I learned a lot about product development, which is driven by profits, not by trying to make the best possible product. I also learned about the value of Intellectual Property and how to make the best use of existing systems when making a new product. I have used the product development lesson in most of my courses throughout my career.
|
|
Working as an undergraduate researcher, helping a grad student with his research, had the greatest impact on my development as an engineer. My job was to make the diodes he had designed, mount them on a test rig and collect data on how they worked. I also helped him program the departmental computer he used to model his devices. This job allowed me to experience the life of a grad student while only a junior and senior. It also provided me with a few dollars a week to support my social life. Almost everything I learned to that point about electronic instrumentation, lab technique, machine language programming, and working with bright, eccentric people came from this experience. I also learned the impact of serendipity on basic research. One night there was a power outage of unknown duration during the several hours necessary to process a silicon wafer. When I measured the performance of the devices, I found that they were almost exactly what ideal theory had predicted. We thought we were geniuses to do so well. However, when we tried multiple times to reproduce our results, nothing worked nearly as well. It was only when we went back through the power records that we found out about the outage. We also no longer had the quartz tube we had used for that batch because it had been broken, so we could not test it for impurities. In the end we had to live with the fact that his diodes were definitely possible to make, but had no idea how to do it. |
|
Lessons Learned: Probably the biggest lesson I learned was that one has to try research to understand what it is and to see if it makes sense as a career direction. That is why there are Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) programs at most universities. Every student who thinks that a research career might be right for them needs to do one or more REUs. Among the many other lessons I took from working in this lab was that the ready and regular access I had to instrumentation like oscilloscopes and power supplies, and the time to tinker with them, were immensely useful in my EE education. It is not possible to get really good at something during the limited time spent in standard undergrad labs. To make the kind of access I had then more generally available to all students, I have spent most of the last 20 years of my life making it possible for students to have their own complete personal set of instruments that they can carry around in a box about the size of a paperback book. The goal has been to provide these instruments as a low cost (generally under $200) add-on to a laptop. Beginning with the RPI Mobile Studio about 15 years ago, we have been able to develop small personal instrumentation boards and encourage companies to come out with better products, so that there are now many options to choose from. This has made it possible to fundamentally change the way basic electrical engineering concepts are learned enabling student-managed, inexpensive, mobile instruments to be used throughout undergraduate studies. This has been particularly successful at Historically Black Colleges through the NSF funded Experiment Centric Pedagogy project that involved nearly every HBCU ECE program (see figure at the right). It is this collaboration that led to the formation of the Inclusive Engineering Consortium.
|
|
The low cost of these new mobile, personal instruments is having an impact throughout the world, especially in places like sub-Saharan Africa where the desire in countries like Ethiopia to expand engineering education has run into the traditional high cost of engineering labs. Through the use of devices like Mobile Studio, and Analog Devices ADALM1000, engineering schools can offer fully equipped labs to their students for the cost of a single lab setup. Colleagues at Morgan State University have been leading this effort, but I have also been able to play a small part by offering workshops in places like Ghana. The photo to the left is from such a workshop held in Accra several years ago. The relentless drive in engineering design to make the products we use ever cheaper and more capable has gotten us to the point where financial constraints are no longer the biggest barrier to expanding opportunities in engineering. With these new tools, we are able to confirm that hands-on learning is still the very best way to become an engineer or scientist. The many programs I have been honored to participate in that have focused on historically underserved communities in STEM, including women, have shown that the approach we are following can help IEC and other organizations reach the goal of enabling the graduation of more and better minority and women engineers. |
|
In closing, I hope that young people planning their careers can effectively learn from the experiences of people like me, they can develop and embrace a personal STEM identity, and that they can have the fun and satisfaction I have enjoyed as an electrical engineer. |
|
Click below to watch the Inclusive Leader Award Ceremony featuring inspirational messages from the diverse Award Winners
|
|
GlobalMindED and the SDG Impact Fund are delighted to announce GlobalMindED's Donor Advised Fund. 2020 is the 75th Anniversary of the United Nations and the 25th Anniversary of the Beijing Women's Declaration and Action Platform. Many from around the world are thinking of 2020 as the gateway to our most vital decade for delivering equity, the Sustainable Development Goals, and a world where all can thrive. Our key time for these outcomes is 2020-2030.
GlobalMindED DAF and the SDG Impact Fund are a powerful combined force for good as the 2019 year comes to a close and we reflect on the gratitude and the commitments we make to the causes we care most about. The DAF offers immense power and flexibility for giving prior to the year's end as you plant seeds of generous intention for 2020 and the decade ahead.
When you contribute to GlobalMindED, you support First Gen students. We have served more than 400 students by connecting them to role models, mentors, internships and jobs. Your generous support will allow us to take our work 10x and reach these talented students at scale who lack the resources and support we provide. Your support also helps teachers who can't afford the conference fees, faculty at colleges which are under resourced and students who persist at those universities despite food insecurity and/or housing insecurity.
|
|
Links to read about Inclusive Leaders, many of whom are African American and people of color:
Curated sessions from GlobalMindED 2020 YouTube channel:
|
|
From the Center for Positive Organizations:
From the Economist:
From Forbes:
From Harvard Business Review:
From the World Academy of Art & Science and UN; Geneva Global Leadership in the 21st Century econference:
|
|
Listen here for an interview with Pam Newkirk, GlobalMindED speaker and author of Diversity Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion- Dollar Business.
|
|
Meet GlobalMindED Founder, Carol Carter as interviewed by Tim Moore on his podcast Success Made to Last: From Success to Significance
Listen to Part 1 of Carol's interview
Listen to Part 2 of Carol's interview
|
|
Recent GlobalMindED Newsletter Profiles:
|
|
Since 2006 when the flagship TGR Learning Lab opened its doors in Anaheim, CA, TGR Foundation has had a lot to celebrate, including its most recent milestone of one million students impacted by TGR EDU: Explore, alone.
Developed in partnership with Discovery Education, TGR EDU: Explore is a free digital resource library that offers interactive web experiences, lesson plans, training videos and tools for educators, students and families to explore new disciplines and gain skills for a modern and expanding workforce.
|
|
As you start the New Year, are you looking for ways to re-engineer your classroom culture? Check out Designing the Future: How Engineering Builds Creative Critical Thinking in the Classroom. The associated website has lots of activities, projects, and resources you can implement immediately. Our fall workshops using the book as a roadmap for change have been highly successful. Start designing the future today - try using the customized Study Guide for a book study in your PLC. Or contact ProjectEngin or Solution Tree to learn how you can bring professional development based on Ann's book to your school, district, or conference.
|
|
|
|
THE FLYOVER NATION
Energy's Role in a Troubled Heartland
By J.C. Whorton
A unique and timely discussion of the challenging issues facing the country’s troubled Heartland.
Since the beginning of westward expansion into the Heartland’s vast regions, natural resource development has played a historic role in shaping its communities. Today, domestic oil and gas development offers one of the strongest prospects for the Heartland’s present and future prosperity as well as the nation’s re-emergence as a dominant player in the global energy economy.
The U.S. is now the world’s largest producer of crude oil and natural gas, two circumstances that are universally disrupting international geopolitical order. The earth has a finite supply of natural resources and a rapidly growing and over consuming population.
As America positions itself for a very uncertain and constantly evolving global marketplace, will the Heartland become America’s “great connector” or “great divide”?
|
|
J.C. Whorton is a senior level energy and financial professional with over forty years of essential experience. Having a ranching and Native American heritage, Mr. Whorton is a strong advocate for rural education and economic development initiatives.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
