Cummins partners with Purdue's minority engineers through NSBE

WEST LAFAYETTE — Purdue senior Robbie Williams knows she is one of three African-American women in her mechanical engineering major. She also knows there's four African-American men in her college. She doesn't need to see university data or scroll through a roster. She can simply look around the room and count the students who look like her. 

That's seven out of 1,500 undergrads in mechanical engineering. 

The Minority Engineering Program, which encapsulates all underrepresented students, has been putting time, money and effort in raising those numbers.

The National Society of Black Engineers, which was founded at Purdue, has a new goal to graduate 10,000 African-American engineers every year by 2025. That would be more than double the current rate.

The new scholarship and partnership with engine manufacturer Cummins is a giant leap in making that happen.

The Cummins Integrated Pipeline Program and NSBE world headquarters announced a five year, $1.5 million scholarship for NSBE members. Members at Purdue and historically black Howard University were selected to be eligible.

As part of the program, five sophomore students will receive scholarship funding as well as a summer internship with Cummins. 

Williams, Purdue's NSBE chapter president, called it the full package.

"It's everything you'd want as a student," she said. "From the financial side to the professional experience side. People have been really excited about it."

Virginia Booth-Womack, director of the Minority Engineering Program and NSBE chapter advisor, calls NSBE's 2025 benchmark a "bodacious goal" but it's one she's working to make a reality.

After a 15 years as an industrial engineer, Booth-Womack returned to Purdue as the MEP director in 2004. At the time, the graduation retention rate for minority engineers was 63 percent — a statistic the College of Engineering and MEP deemed as unsatisfactory.

"When I looked at the data around underrepresented minorities and the total cohort, all of the sudden it was an IE [industrial engineering] problem and that excited me," she said. "I'm here working on throughput issues for students, and not engines. I like going from engines to engineers."

The MEP starts to gauge interest in STEM and engineering with kids as young as third grade through a partnership with the Lafayette School Corp. and summer camps. In particular, there's a focus on algebra proficiency after studies showed students who don't have a firm grasp on algebra by the end of eighth grade have slim chances of continuing on an engineering path.  

The numbers are particularly bleak for students of color.

Only 19 percent of African-American fourth-graders in the U.S. and 13 percent of the nation’s African-American eighth-graders were proficient in math in 2015, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

As a result, only 1.1 percent of the nation’s African-American college freshmen enrolled in engineering programs in 2010, according to a NSBE analysis.

By piquing students' interest early on and having wrap around support during the transition from high school to college, MEP is successful in bringing more underrepresented engineers into the fold and keeping them there.

And the numbers show it.

The most recent graduation retention rates for minority engineers have increased to 93 percent, Booth Womack said. Last year, the minority engineer five-year graduation rate surpassed the overall College of Engineering number.

"It was bigger than Obama becoming president," she said. "I wanted the whole university to stop."

Sometimes the celebration can feel diminished by those who think programs like MEP mean "special treatment" for underrepresented students, Booth Womack said.

"That's feels sort of frustrating," she said. "It's like if you had a hospital that treated certain conditions it's there because it realizes conditions exist. Sometimes a fix is not that difficult, it just means caring."

Booth Womack's psychology degree and engineering degree work in tandem when she talks about how racial disparities play out. She talks about the nuances of financial hurdles and societal prejudices felt by students of color. But she also knows not everyone is willing to have that discussion.

And so again, she goes back to the metrics.

In 2013, the freshman class of engineers clocked in at 1,800.

Booth Womack often asks parents at orientation to guess how many of those students were African-American. The responses usually range in the 200s.

The actual answer is 19.

"It's a real issue," she said. "But Purdue sees it and doesn't accept it as okay. So that's why these programs exist."

Beyond a company diversity statement or university slogan representation does matter and holds value. Even for a student like Williams who grew up in a family was heavily focused in STEM, having a role model to look up to made all the difference.

"For me going into mechanical, there was another black woman who acted as a mentor and to have that go-to person and to see yes, this can be done. It was done by another person, it was motivating," Williams said.

Having more minorities in the engineering field both professionally and academically is not just about checking the box for a diverse workplace. It runs deeper and on a much more personal level.

Booth Womack said the first time she saw Purdue's first African-American graduate, David Robert Lewis's picture in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering, she wept.

"I stood there and I wept like a child," she said. "I could not believe it. 1894? I know I can do this if he did it then. If he can graduate, Virginia, suck it up. You can do this."

Booth Womack experience as one of NSBE's founding members helped prepare her for professional life where she was often the only woman or one of few African-American employees.

"The beautiful thing is I'm a Purdue engineer so if you give me the work I'm going to nail it," she said. "That will speak for itself. It doesn't matter what you think of me as a female or as an African-American. Think about me for the value of the work I do."

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Contact Journal & Courier reporter Lindsay Moore at 765-420-5205, lrmoore@jconline.com and follow her on Twitter: @_lindsaymoore.