Supporting Black Engineers in a Virtual World
Reflections on my experience at the 46th Annual National Society of Black Engineers Virtual Convention
For a few days in August 2020, I had the distinct pleasure of attending the 46th Annual National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) Convention. Like most things 2020, the traditional structural framework undergirding the convention was stripped away. As one would expect in this era of social distancing, NSBE was a fully online, virtual experience.
The 46th NSBE was a stark contrast to only four years ago, in 2016, when I made the trek from my home at the time in Philadelphia to the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center to attend NSBE’s 42nd Annual Convention. 2016 was a pivotal, transitional year for my young family of four. We were making a planned move from our home in suburban Philadelphia to start a new life in Southern California. By late March when the 42nd NSBE had begun, my wife, a highly accomplished physician, had already secured and started her new position beyond the north valley of Los Angeles. Before departing for Boston, I handed off our two small children to join her in California. I had yet to find employment on the west coast but I was confident in an economy that was, by this time, in accelerated rebound from the 2008 fiscal crisis.
While the NSBE Convention offers much more than a career fair, I attended NSBE in March 2016 with the express intent to find a job to join my family. I knew NSBE first and foremost as an oasis of opportunity for technically trained Black talent. I knew this partly because I helped recruit Black talent early in my career at the 31st NSBE Convention in 2005 in service to the employer I was leaving behind in Philadelphia. Even with a resume padded with 15 years of employment in technical roles by 2016, prior to the 42nd NSBE I had no success securing interviews for jobs specifically located in Southern California notwithstanding a heavy presence of my industry in the region. So I went to the 42nd NSBE with a stack of cardstock resumes and a heart full of hope to stand on the job-seeking side of the recruiting table.
In typical fashion, NSBE did not disappoint. I interacted directly with several hiring managers for various promising roles. In a world where industry experience is often valued more than educational pedigree, I was a minor celebrity on the recruiting floor. In contrast to prior experience dropping resumes in the digital abyss of company websites and digital job boards, my resume visibly went to the top of piles. I was quickly ushered to convention floor back rooms for first-round interviews after only brief encounters with Human Resource staff from several well-known technical firms. Most significantly, I had my first round of interviews with the company in which I was ultimately employed. I hired into a position that was a short 10-minute drive from my wife’s medical center. The 42nd NSBE in 2016 was an all-around success story from my vantage point.
So that brings me back to 2020. In the face of a year that for many brings death, pain, job loss, uncertainty, and sadness, I have blessings to count. I am approaching my 4th year employed for the same company I first interviewed at the 42nd NSBE having been promoted to a Senior Principal Software Engineer position. In addition, after 3 years of part-time toil in between my day job and duties to my family, I completed a Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) degree at the University of California Berkeley School of Information only days before the convention. To add fruit to an already overflowing bounty, my MIDS capstone team was honored with the coveted Hal R. Varian MIDS Capstone Award for our work developing an artificial intelligence computer vision pipeline to classify protected and endangered wildlife from footprint images in collaboration with a non-profit conservation organization called WildTrack. WildTrack’s mission is to preserve biodiversity on our planet through non-invasive methods.
This time around, at the 46th NSBE I was on the other side of the recruiting table on behalf of the U.C. Berkeley School of Information. I became enveloped in the overwhelmingly altered experience of the virtual convention. These kinds of remote events are not completely unfamiliar in that the MIDS degree is an online experience. I was appropriately conditioned for the synchronous and asynchronous encounters virtual environments dictate.
This realization forged by MIDS left me reflecting on the lives and struggles of a wave of students matriculating from institutions of higher learning seeking gainful employment in the midst of a global health crisis.
I thought about the disorientation they must have felt having been pried from the familiar atmosphere of their learning environments to complete final semesters from home. I thought about the anti-climactic nature of lost graduation ceremonies and celebrations of achievement. And now, to be on the other side of a computer screen immersed in a virtual convention attempting to find profit in a world filled with loss.
I then found myself reflecting on how the almost global shift to working from home revealed the structural inequities suffered by the under-privileged who continue to show up to front line positions at grocery stores, food packing plants, and gig economy jobs. I thought about all the children growing up in inner cities and remote rural locations with little to no access to broadband internet with circumstances maladaptive for learning from home. I thought about how the highly-publicized murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in the midst of the crisis became a reminder that Black Lives do indeed Matter and that we as a nation have failed again to live up to the standards espoused in our founding documents that all are created equal. I thought about the teenage boys in my own suburban enclave north of Los Angeles who after defending themselves from a violent, drug-seeking homeless person endured further victimization and humiliation from biased police officers pointing hand guns and an assault rifle while handcuffing the teens.
Then my heart broke a little more. I reflected back to the sea of young, Black, and talented graduates flooding the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center back in 2016 for the 42nd NSBE — many of them with freshly minted technical degrees seeking their first entry-level opportunity. I thought about the challenges I faced in better times even with my education and professional experience. I acknowledged in my mind that not as many of today’s Black college graduates would gain the foothold needed to find career success in these uncertain times in the unusual circumstances predicated by a virtual convention.
In the same way that working and learning from home left disproportionately more Black people behind, “career fairing” from home is likely to have the same ends despite NSBE’s best efforts.
Both in spite of all this and because of all this, I applaud the National Society of Black Engineers for turning lemons into lemonade by holding a virtual convention and career fair in the middle of a global pandemic. I applaud all the firms and universities that maintained virtual booths and aggressively recruited Black technical talent. I celebrate my new Alma mater, U.C. Berkeley School of Information, for its support of NSBE and its acknowledgment that Black technical talent exists and has a place in its hallowed halls. I challenge all the above to make the extra effort needed beyond the convention to secure the Black talent that may be on the less privileged side of the digital divide. I eagerly look forward to the time we can all gather again to celebrate and reward the achievements of Black Engineers.
