NSBE’s mission is to increase the number of black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally, and help the community. | Source: NSBE
The National Society of Black Engineers, or NSBE, will be meeting in Chicago next week for its annual convention. The four-day 50th anniversary celebration will bring together more than 18,000 technical professionals nationwide.
The conference will include pre-collegiate people, current college students, and technical professionals. It has programming geared toward each group, including talks from NSBE’s four living founders, a career fair, technical sessions, and more.
A career fair will include important players from the robotics industry, such as ABB, Blue Origin, Honeywell, John Deere, NVIDIA, Rockwell Automation, Siemens, and Zoox.
Janeen Uzzell, CEO of the organization, spoke with The Robot Report about what she’s most looking forward to at the show, the importance of organizations like NSBE, and more. Uzzell has been a member of NSBE since she was an undergraduate student at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.
“When I got ready to go to the school, the dean of the engineering school told my parents, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll do fine here,” Uzzell said. “‘We’re going to put her in a club called NSBE.’ So, how wild is it that 30-plus years later, I come back and I’m the first CEO?”
Uzzell added that she can speak about the benefits of NBSE because, for her, “it did all of the things it was designed to do.” The organization provided her with community during long nights studying in college and a large network of open-minded people willing to take a chance on her.
“That’s what we provide students today: a place for acceptance, a place where they can just get through the hard classes,” Uzzell said.
50 years later, going back to NSBE’s roots
It’s not a coincidence that NSBE’s 50th anniversary convention will be held in Chicago. It’s the same city where NSBE was founded and the same place the organization held its first-ever conference in 1976. That event brought in just 127 students from Purdue and other nearby universities. Now, the student-led organization will be welcoming thousands of members.
“[NSBE] was launched in 1975 at Purdue University by these six guys that grew up on the South Side of Chicago,” Uzzell said. “They started NSBE because minority students were flunking out of the engineering program at Purdue, and they needed to create a space where students could get help. They wanted to provide tutoring and camaraderie and friendship.”
Those six founding members — Anthony Harris, Brian Harris, Stanley L. Kirtley, Edward A. Coleman, George A. Smith, and John W. Logan, Jr. — faced the challenges of building NSBE just 10 years after the end of the Jim Crow era and the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“We souldn’t be here if it weren’t for our founders,” Uzzell said. “So ensuring that our students know who our founders are and what it was like to build this organization, how bold they had to be, how steadfast they had to be in the ’70s, it’s been my priority.”
When Uzzell asked the founders what they wanted to discuss at the show, they said they wanted to talk about how much today feels like 1975, when they first founded NSBE. They overcame adversity then, and they said people can do it again now.
While Uzzell acknowledged that many attendees are feeling disappointed by recent attacks on diversity initiatives, that doesn’t mean there’s room for despair.
“I think that disappointment is acceptable,” she said. “Discouragement is a choice that you have to overcome. So we can be disappointed, but we’ve got to reach beyond discouragement, or we will get stifled. We won’t get any work done.”
NSBE holds the door for the next generation
NSBE’s annual conference includes programming geared towards middle and high school students interested in engineering. | Source: NSBE
As an organization, NSBE provides a launchpad for students who are already working hard. “[The students] are studying, they’re showing up, taking exams, and passing them. They’re doing the work,” Uzzell said.
NSBE helps these students with everything from getting their resumes ready to ensuring that they have the clothes they need to look professional at an interview or job fair.
“We have to be willing to take a bet on our community,” Uzzell said. “And I don’t just mean our black community, I mean this STEM community. This community of people that think differently.”
Currently, NSBE members are at work in the government, in the military, at universities, and in every area of business – leaving thousands of members in the industry to hold doors open for younger members.
“Being a globalist, having worked and lived both in the U.S. and internationally, when you get a glimpse of how big the world is, you realize you can open up every door, and there’ll still be one for you,” Uzzell said. “There’s just so much opportunity out there. It’s nothing to fight over.”
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Diverse teams provide tangible value
Lately, talking about diversity feels like navigating a minefield of buzzwords and acronyms. What gets lost is the value of having a team of people from different backgrounds and ways of thinking.
When it comes to the tangible value diversity brings, Uzzell went back to her missteps in this area. She recalled one of the biggest mistakes of her career that she was able to turn into a success, building an engineering team at GE focused on building handheld ultrasound equipment.
“We built a very biased, unilateral team of engineers to solve a global problem, and it failed. Incredibly,” recalled Uzzell. “We tried to solve a problem with a very Americanized mindset, and when we took it overseas to India and other places, they were like, ‘That doesn’t work for us here.’”
Despite the misstep, Uzzell was given a second chance to build a team. This time, she included nurses, midwives, and other people from the global services sector. She also moved the entire team overseas so they could solve the problem where it was actually happening, and it worked.
“The product still has incredible success today, many iterations later,” Uzzell said. “But we had to learn how to speak a communal language with the women that delivered the babies.”
Uzzell’s advice for those navigating the industry
NSBE has over 800 chapters worldwide with more than 24,000 members. | Source: NSBE
Uzzell said she wants young black engineers to know that NSBE isn’t going anywhere.
“I want them to know, as the CEO of NSBE, along with our national chair who leads the membership movement, that NSBE remains an essential partner with academic institutions, with corporate sponsors and partners,” she stated. “We’re here, and we’re going to continue to develop and connect engineering talent to meet industry demands.”
“We’re going to keep building the pipeline, we’re going to keep answer the phone calls, we’re going to keep opening the doors,” she continued. “What I want them to know is that they just have to keep knocking and letting us know where we can jump in.”
Uzzell also noted that it’s important to block out the noise and the things that don’t matter so you can better focus on the things that do.
“This a time for us to be more united than ever and to stay the course, not in fear, not in retaliation or in anger; those are the emotions that will hold us back,” Uzzell said. “Instead, we should have a great hope, and I do.”