Letter from the Editor Dear IEC Community, I hope you are all having a productive Fall semester and looking forward to the holiday season, which oddly enough always seems to be slowly approaching at this time of the year.  For those of us who had been temporarily unplugged due to COVID ramifications, I am pleased to share that IEC has been growing. Our community is now composed of 20 sustaining members made up of 15 HBCUs, 3 HSIs, and 2 TCUs. Please join me in welcoming participants from our newest member schools: Navajo Technical University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute. Their perspectives and contributions will be of great value to our organization as we continue to develop and implement initiatives to make ECE more inclusive.  > Read More Mandoye Ndoye Associate Professor  Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Tuskegee University

Calendar of Events January 18 and 20, 2022 EquiTECH: Building Equitable Culture for Collaboration Virtual Conference - Details coming soon! March 25-28, 2022 IEC Academic Symposium at ECEDHA 2022 New Orleans, Annual Conference- Details coming soon!

Featured Article

Corey Albert Graves Associate Professor North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University  Join the INCLUDES Alliance, EHR Racial Equity in STEM Education, and CISE Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) Alliance Working Groups Interested in collaborating with others in the IEC Community? Please indicate your interest below. For more information on the opportunities, view our presentation to the left.

NC A&T SU Team Wins 2021 Moguls in the Making Competition with Major Contributions from Engineering Students Overview of Competition and Results: During three intense days in the middle of September 2021, fifty students from ten HBCUs participated in the third annual Moguls in the Making competition. This competition was sponsored by Ally in collaboration with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and the Sean Anderson Foundation. Teams were assigned different areas of focus around which to develop a seven-minute, Shark Tank-style, a business idea to pitch to competition judges at the end of the 72-hour competition. After their pitches, each team had three minutes of Q&A from the judges about their business ideas. Each team of five, from each university, was multidisciplinary in nature. In the end, NC A&T SU’s team came out on top with an innovative idea conceived based on engineering know-how and an orientation toward community service. > Read More  IEC Grant Opportunities and Working Groups Hear Pamela-Leigh Mack, Virginia State University and Board Member, IEC discuss IEC Grant and Working Group participation opportunities as discussed in the IEC Member Meeting.

If you would like to participate in a working group, please indicate your interest below. Messaging & Identity Development Select Transitions Select Shared Curriculum Select Mentoring & Professional Development Select Academy, Industry & Community Engagement Select Assessment & Evaluation Select

Click here for the description of each Working Group

Thinking Outside The Box

Kenneth A. Connor Professor Emeritus, Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Member, Board of Directors, Inclusive Engineering Consortium

The Research-Education Nexus For this issue, I have a question that I definitely do not have an answer to: What is the proper balance between research and teaching, especially at an institution that historically has focused on undergraduate education? There are many excellent reasons why access to high-quality research experiences is important to the education of electrical and computer engineers. It is because of the value of such experiences that our community supports the highly successful multi-university program Smart Cities Research Experience for Undergraduates and Teachers (SCR2). (NSF Award #1849454) Participating students and teachers have rated their research experiences very highly, even during the challenging time of Covid.  > Read More

Professional/Career Development

Mandoye Ndoye Associate Professor  Electrical/Computer Engineering Department Tuskegee University

Basic Net Etiquette Recommendations Electronic forms of communication like E-mail have become indispensable for educators. To use them effectively and avoid common pitfalls, it is helpful to regularly remind ourselves of some seemingly basic net etiquette rules like the ones below recommended by Joni Truville from the Alberta’s Teachers Association.   Make your messages concise. Clip the content of the original message in a reply and include only the part that is pertinent, that way the reader does not have to scroll forever to remember what was said Ask the original author's permission before forwarding his or her message to someone else. > Read More

Sister Nonprofits

Kenneth A. Connor Professor Emeritus, Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Member, Board of Directors, Inclusive Engineering Consortium

As a new feature of IEC Exchange, we are now providing an introduction to other organizations that have the potential to impact IEC faculty, staff, and students. The first such organization is even younger than the IEC. Black in Engineering (BIE) began in 2020 with a meeting organized by Dr. Carlotta Berry, Dr. Monica Cox, and Dr. Tahira Reid Smith. Carlotta is a great contact for us because she is a professor of ECE at Rose-Hulman. If you visit the Black in Engineering website, you will find that its' purpose is to support black faculty, researchers, practitioners, and students in engineering and to serve as a resource for community building, sharing experiences with implicit bias and systemic racism, providing action items to address racial injustice, and identifying collaborators and sponsors.  > More Information

Institutional Spotlight

UMES EASC DEPARTMENT PROFILE

The Department of Engineering and Aviation Sciences at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) offers a Bachelor of Science degree in General Engineering with specializations in Aerospace, Computer, Electrical, and Mechanical, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Aviation Science with concentrations in Professional Pilot and Aviation Management. The BS Engineering program was established in 2007 and is accredited by ABET since 2011. The Aviation Science program was established in the 1980s and is the only degree program in the state that offers professional pilot training.  The mission of the UMES Engineering program is to provide a program of learning opportunities that enable students to become  • Well educated professionals in general engineering with specialization in electrical, mechanical, aerospace, or computer engineering in accordance with modern standards and expectations of the field   • Intellectually curious and accomplished independent thinkers, inventors, and creators of knowledge and as practitioners of general engineering with specializations  • Broadly educated in the humanities, social sciences, and ethics, and sensitive and embrace value-based education as well as nurture global values.

UMES engineering student team won 2nd place in the AMIE Design Challenge “How to improve mobility and safety of visually impaired individuals in public areas“ during the 2020 BEYA STEM Conference.

UMES aviation science alumni at the 30th-anniversary celebration to honor the founder of the engineering and airway science programs at the university.

Learn more about UMES Here

IEC Corporate Members

Want to get involved? Participate, speak, sponsor! Opportunities are available. Contact Tymia Wilson at twilson@iec.org

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