 HBC Digest Radio, welcome back to our HBC Voices of STEM Excellent series, profiling the best and brightest among historically black colleges and universities from the student and professional perspective. Today our honored guest is Dr. Cecilia Wright-Brown. She is a faculty, distinguished professor of engineering at Morgan State University and an entrepreneur here to tell us about her personal journey to be one of the few sisters in the country and in the world. I'm a woman with a doctorate in engineering so Dr. Wright-Brown is an honor to have you on today. Hi, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So at Morgan as a professor in one of the great engineering schools in the country, particularly for African Americans, with a degree and a credential that is not commonly found held by sisters, how did you get here, what's the path here? Well I had a very roundabout path to get to engineering so I was very blessed to have had a mother who was not afforded the opportunity to go to college but was the daughter of a carpenter and my mother designed and built, I'm from the Midwest, my mother designed and built the house that I grew up in, my sister and I grew up in in Ohio and I just saw how, you know, not women were never afforded full opportunity and my mother was a big advocate of education. She always would say baby, she said if there's nothing else, get as much education as you can get because that's one thing that can never be taken away from you. So my mother and my father, they sacrificed to send both my sister and I to private school and fundamental, education fundamentals is essential and from that strong fundamental in education we moved on to, you know, go to college and graduate school and so forth. But I think the driving force behind my doctorate degree in engineering was my mother and as a side note, during my mother was born in 1920s and she was not afforded to, as I said, opportunity to go to college because of the time she lived in, she actually received a scholarship to go to Bennett but her father went an hour ago. So I just saw the struggle not just of my mother but of other black women, trying to go to night school, trying to get high school diplomas, trying to raise kids and I just, I just didn't, I just saw opportunity for me to move to the next phase so because of their sacrifice I was able to move to the next phase which is to get as much as I could in the education arena and then of course pull up and go back. So when I work with, not just college students, I also work with my local school system with K through 12 education. We just did a hydroponics and tinkering program and just trying to work with especially urban youth and even rural students to get them into the STEM field, young women and young men now of color or underserved groups is still a challenge. When you think about your college choice process, what were you looking for in an institution and what, how did you eventually settle, oh I shouldn't say settle but how did you eventually pick where you wound up and what was that experience like on campus? Oh my goodness. So I had a very interesting road path to, to the institution I graduated from. So originally I was very fortunate to have had, you know, that K through 12 experience to prepare me for my SAT and I did relatively well on the SAT and I received a scholarship to Brown and West Point and a couple other schools but I was immature. So I wound up going to a school, a smaller school in Ohio and I didn't like it. So my sister, we had a home in Baltimore and my sister moved here to finish her graduate degree. She said why don't you come on over here so you can finish college or get your college, get yourself together. So I came here and I started out going to Coppin originally because it wasn't too far for me to commute. And that was my first experience at an HBCU. So my K through 12 experience, I was the first to integrate my school, my elementary, middle school and then my high school. We had about 500 girls and there were only two blacks in the school. So for me to go to, I didn't know that the concept of HBCU, that's not something that majority institutions, you know, put out there. So I had to learn really our culture. The HBCU culture, the population. So the instructors that I had, originally I was a biology major. I thought I was going to go to med school. All of the instructors I had at Coppin were excellent and all of them were Howard Alam. Wow. So they gave you the Howard experience at Coppin. Yes, they gave me the Howard experience at Coppin. So was that a shock to the system? Oh my gosh, yes. Oh my gosh. It was a shock. Oh my gosh, yes. But you know your blackness kicks in and you know what's innate that inner voice kicks in and you know you make it work. So it was at Coppin a couple of years and realized what am I doing? Get yourself together. What are you going to do? Where's your life? What are you going to do with yourself? So I transferred to a majority institution and I realized I did not like it at all. So while I was at this majority institution they actually had a co-op like partnership with Morgan Coppin. I think all of the schools in the area have this disjoint relationship. It was a course I needed to take and I wound up going over to Morgan to take it. I had this one professor that I didn't know he was renowned for being so you know a great professor and he just dropped, fixed his lease of knowledge on me that just stuck with me and by the time I finished his course I had already put in my paperwork to transfer to Morgan full time and that's where I landed and that's where I stayed. So you graduated from Morgan, you are a true villain in that you started at Coppin for all of us who graduated from Morgan. So do you kind of consider yourself an eagle and a bear or do you have the right frame of mind? Oh I'm a bear. I'm a bear. There you go. All the way down. I've got to get my orange and blue all the way, I'll be at home coming. So when you think about the transition into graduate education, do you look at the time at Coppin and Morgan and say that wow that really prepared me, I didn't know how well prepared I was or was there a cultivating period where you had to become acclimated to that level of research and that level of instruction? So one thing I will say, it is just my opinion and my experience, it's good to have both experiences. To have majority and an HBCU experience because it prepares you for life. When you leave an HBCU it's not going to be majority people of color that you may be working with. You're going to have to be able to deal with a diverse population. So in engineering, as you may or may not know, it's nine times out of ten it's not going to be us that you're going to be working with. So you have to be prepared to understand the technology and be able to transition it to this population, this population, this population. So you need to make sure that you're still sharp, just as sharp as the HBCU has at a majority. What I will say that HBCU does a little different than majority is that there's more hands on. It may be a little rougher hand sometimes, but sometimes you've got to rough us up to get us out of that baby mode, you know, to grow us up a little. Sometimes you've got to grow up and it could be hard for us over time. But also there's more of an effort to transition you not just from the institution but you into the workforce or you into a higher degree or to transition you. There's more effort for once you leave the university or leave the college that there's some place you're going someplace you're just not going to be out there. So I saw for us in engineering we have more efforts for recruitment so that you're doing an internship that leads to employment or you're interacting with a vice president from a Fortune 500 company or we have professional organizations and conferences and conventions that we go to that put us in a position to not just learn from our university experience but we interact with our other colleagues from other institutions. So there's more of an infrastructure for engineers for us to do little self-support and then our university and even our faculty to support us in a lot of different ways. So there's opportunities there. When you think about your individual career and over the years how STEM has become a really or at least trying to expose minority and black students to STEM has become much more aggressive over time. How do you parallel your career to the opportunities and options that are now available to students? Well of course there were limited a lot more limited opportunities but now what I'm seeing is that students if you have an interest there's some place for you to go and there's someone there to at least help you. So I am seeing more K through 12 programs for STEM. There's more effort and funding so now not just federal or state funding but private organizations public and private are working together so there's coding opportunities. We have a real deficit in our population that are transitioning into computer science and computer engineering, software engineering, there's real deficit there. What I'm finding is that in K through 12 something happens where either we're turned off or interest is neglected or we just don't have the home infrastructure to help promote some of these areas. So the opportunities are there. A lot of times I would think that maybe people just don't have the exposure they don't know it's there because I always say you have to know something to ask something. But now with social media, with the internet, with television, with commercials, with podcasts, with a LinkedIn, a Twitter, a tweaking, it's out there now so and I know young people stay on their phones all day every day. What's the biggest challenge that you think it exists for black students period to become interested in STEM and then to really curate a talent for it? I know that the idea is to start early but what you mentioned earlier, some of the work that you do through K through 12, what are some of the strategies you use to get young people, particularly black boys and girls, invested in and energized about a STEM career? It starts at home. You have to get to the parent. The teachers are there but it's the parent. So we actually spend a very limited amount of time with the young people, with our students. Those young people are exposed to their home environment, their parents, their families, much more, they spend much more time with them than we do. So trying to get the parent engaged, we try to have parent and student activities where the parent can come in and do some STEM while they're working with their child. So try to find ways to get them both engaged. Try to do things. I know one of our activities are revolved around nutrition and STEM. So trying to do something to help the parent and then help the child learn as well. So it has to start at the home. So it starts with the parents. If you can't get the parents, the next step is the school. But school, K through 12 teachers, they have a lot on their plate. They have a lot on their plate. So it's a lot. So you need universities like professionals like myself. You need corporate outreach. Some companies have individuals, they have programs where their employees come out and do so much service in the community or service at school. So it's going to take a village to really get young people, especially underserved populations, stimulated in STEM. So it takes a lot. And that's where we are. We're trying to get to the parents. If we can't get to the parents, we're trying to have something in the schools. We're trying to get more of our resources. People who look like us or people brown or black, people to come and work with students in their schools. So it takes a village. What's the one piece of advice, and I really appreciate your time today. What's the one piece of advice that you give young people who are considering an HBCU? They have options to go to other institutions as you had growing up. What is the one thing that you tell them that the HBCU experience provides that you may not find at any other kind of institution? The one thing that an HBCU provides that I haven't seen at other institutions is a vested interest in your success. I think that an HBCU, our whole mission, our whole infrastructure, our whole efforts are geared towards your academic success, not just at the institution, but how you're reflected and how you're perceived outside of the institution. I like to make sure that I'm presenting myself in a certain manner and I'm presenting my university at a certain level of professionalism and expertise. Because if I'm not successful at this particular venue or entity or place or business, that will directly affect the pipeline to them. So I'm always not just looking to think about myself. I'm thinking about the pipeline for someone else. So it's, you know, you're building a bridge. So I may be laying this down, you know, building a house. I'm laying the foundation, but from that foundation, there comes a whole lot of things on top of that. So I feel that HBCUs give you the foundation and the infrastructure to cultivate you into a young adult and then transition you into the workforce or into a higher education or into research, or whatever it is that you would like to do or entrepreneurship, you may decide you want to go in business. So I think that infrastructure is there for you. And I think that they cultivate you at a much different level and they meet you where you are at a different place than other institutions.