 Greetings everyone. My name is Marvin Turner. I'm originally from Atlanta. I currently attend Morehouse College studying computer science and welcome to Autocon. I'm doing a talk if you have any questions or if you want to engage in conversation afterwards feel free to tweet me at Marvin K. Turner and there's also an Autocon post I made on my blog at blog.marvinktonor.com. There's a discus feed at the bottom where you can leave comments and questions as well. So I want to talk about the great disparity in STEM. First of all I want to start off by defining a minority as an individual who does not identify themselves as non-Hispanic or white alone or in combination with any other ethnicity and that's from a definition that I derived from the U.S. Census Bureau, the code sheet that they made from 2010 census in the year 2011. From that same document I related to extrapolate that minorities make up 33.9% of the current population in the U.S. and they make up 33.2% of the college age population. But minorities only make up around 17.7% of those who hold advanced degrees in STEM, that science, technology, engineering, and math. So according to current population growth rates by the year 2040 we will have a minority majority and that's a phenomenon where collectively all the minority groups add up to more than the largest single group. So currently the largest single group is of course Caucasians or white Americans. But by the year 2040 all the minority groups will be more than will hold more of their population than Caucasians and that's important because they hold these minorities hold a significant lower amount of tech jobs or just tech degrees of period. If they're going to be the majority then they need to step up and fill those roles or else they will be untaken jobs. Touched on that point. So the unemployment rate, well why should this even be important? Why should minorities even go into STEM? We want to highlight that unemployment rate for a PhD in computing field is 0.8% as referenced by the 2012-2013 TABI survey which is released by the Computing Research Association. They do a survey every year where they take statistics from a certain number of computer science, computer engineering, and informatics departments across the nation and they run statistics on the data to find out certain trends about enrollment in the computer fields. The national unemployment rate for a computing professional is 3.5% compared with the 9.6% for Latinos or Latino people and 13.8% for African Americans and that's from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and in that same document you can find that the average salary for a computing professional is around $77,000. That's a big number I want you to remember that $77,000. Let me say that. $77,000. All right. So moving on to the war on poverty. If anybody who watched the Academy of War this past week, Patricia I can't make in her seven speech she made, she talked about wage equality. She focused on women but it's important to minorities as well and also opportunity quality. Jesse Jackson was interviewed for an article in the USA Today and he said that there's not a shortage of jobs but there's a shortage of opportunity meaning that there are certain barriers for entry for minorities in the tech community. In that same vein Jesse Jackson led the charge to press a certain number of tech companies in Silicon Valley to release their diversity statistics as far as employment. So the median computing professional salary is $77,000. Remember that number? Yeah. Okay. So that's more than a median salary for a black family which is around $32,000 plus the median salary for a Latino family which is 37,000 almost $38,000. That's a lot of money. And anecdotal references that you'll see on the next slide suggest that same internships, these are internships for higher level undergraduates, juniors and seniors and maybe some, well some grad students and some maybe some higher level undergraduates. The bottom is about 6k a month plus a housing cycle and the highest ranges are within a $10,000 range. So on the next slide, this came from Twitter. A student was lining up some office from that they were getting for internships and some of their friends that got to take internships and I just want to highlight a couple of them. You can see core at the top is $8,200 plus $1,500 for housing. You have Dropbox 825k plus $5,000 for housing. Google is about $7,000 a month. You have Apple somewhere down there. I can't find it. But Amazon is 6k plus 2.5 a month. Amazon in San Francisco is 7.5k, oh yeah Apple right here, 6k plus 3.5k per month of housing. So where do we go from here? If anybody knows that's a title from the Martin Luther King speech, a lot of people get caught up on I Have a Dream but they don't really focus on Martin Luther King's Poor People's Committee. They started to assemble right before he was unfortunately assassinated. He wanted to focus on economic inequality and racial issues because just allowing blacks to are giving us the rights to go and do something that we couldn't do before wouldn't mean as much if we don't have the opportunities to get ahead. Well financial opportunities lead to better lifestyles and the argument was that how we're able to engage and pursue the happiness that's in the Declaration of Independence if we don't have the same opportunities that other people have. So just um leaving on that point I wanted to I guess make what I think is a valuable or a good plan moving forward for encouraging the strong pipeline in STEM. And so you want to encourage minority students that are in grade school K through 12 to explore that interest in STEM um in other sciences and offer support programs for them either after school before school to keep them engaged and keep them involved um keep them out of trouble in the streets and whatnot. You want to support minority students that are currently in undergraduate programs in college or university and educate them on available jobs and on state finish. Some some students don't know that they can go on and get a master's in a PhD and be an academia and have a pretty stable job. Some people just think they have to go work for another company. Some people don't really know how to start their own company so they don't really want to get into it but that's actually like the biggest thing right now. And finally you know I want to see more offers for minority academics and professionals to attend conferences um knowing we're there left on their own and kind of like apply and qualify on their own. Um and when they take into certain offers I want to pressure them to bring up minorities behind them. So that's a constant pipeline. They're coming up and they're bringing up people behind them. Now talking about access and computing jobs there's a workforce innovation and opportunity act which was signed in August 2014 by President Obama which leads to uh it kind of hops on that point that I was just speaking on before just a plan for the next few years to engage people in STEM and uh sciences to uh better prepare them for the workforce and have skills that employers are looking for. Another program from President Obama is my brother's keeper which he enacted uh about a year ago it's February 27th of 2014 um and that was for uh Latino and Black male youth to keep them engaged in school. Kind of like the same thing for K-12. I'm not going to talk so much about that because uh any computing emails are actually in minority too so we don't want to uh I don't know too much on my brother's keeper because that's it it did with male issues but there's an email issue as well. Um the co-2040 fellowship program focuses on that um I know you enjoy the point that I spoke on in the year 2004 so they got a fellowship program where students can go and get internships at companies in uh excuse me in the Silicon Valley and they have I think above 78 percent uh success rate with students who do uh internships with those companies go on to get a higher amount as a full-time uh employee. Another similar uh institution of the comportionate or social impact and uh another industry into the tech fields for minorities is internships that we spoke of before which one is Apple software inclusion and diversity engineering internship. Uh I personally as a student have traveled to several conferences um and participated in several initiatives that work that had to aim increase the minorities in computing and in computer science uh I was a AAC scholar in the year 2013 and 2014 um AAC science for the extreme science and engineering discovery environment um basically uh dealt with high performance computing another uh conference that I went to was super computing uh and those programs over my eyes saw a lot of what was going on in uh computing outside of what I was learning in academia um I didn't really know a lot about uh what I could do besides programming but it really uh got me interested in research and furthering my education. So some of the good things about those type of programs that under representing minorities um they get to intend how the technical events that had its paradigm should they get funding and live into the attendance events which can be very expensive just with the conference uh attended to be alone but in thinking they're taken to account the cost of flights and hotel rooms that's all funded for them and it's awesome network opportunity you can meet uh professors that you can apply to for graduate school um or maybe even network with uh professional and get a job internship but the bad is that in these programs they have some a lot of times they have a separate curriculum for students in the program so you don't get the full on conference experience you kind of get a water down um experience where they try to prepare for um the regular conference experience maybe good if you don't really know anything so like the first conference altitude was awesome because it taught me some things I didn't know about setting the third time I was like well I want to you know do what everybody else is doing so I guess that can be a bad thing um this is a picture from exceed 2013 and it just I just want to illustrate like how how many blacks and Latinos like are actually supported in these groups um that's from the super computing conference 2013 and Denver um as I can as I was saying like um you have you have this uh cohort of students that you kind of get to meet and you know when you kind of hang around each other but you're trying to have this tendency of hanging around people that like you so you know interact with everybody else like there are a lot of other people of other races in the room but we just kind of collect it together so I just want to be weird that um that was here in Atlanta um it seems 2014 but uh oh well I got to that area but the students end up in a general conference uh population of the conference so it ends up being the same thing that they were trying to avoid and you end up with a general conference that looks something like this there aren't any minorities in this picture and that's another demonstration from let's see 2013 but what we need is minority students who attend present and compete with those in the regular program and want greater support for minority faculty who may bring other minority students um so that we can have pictures like this and this and this um this is um a type of uh celebration of diversity in computing it's a conference that deals with diversity so there are the cries a lot more diverse that is the actual that is one of the plenary talks um but I kind of want to see conferences like exceeding super computing that see look more like this and it'll take a while for more and more and more students and academic professionals to go through the pipeline and gain their the technical credentials they need to apply to these type of events but um it is something to hope for so now I want to leave some time for any questions or comments that anybody might have that they wanted to voice no question I actually really love talking about money and I really like talking about Valerie so I was wondering if you could share some of the stories or uh feelings you get from people when you cite things like the salary is this kind of see the amount of what I mean like what how what is the historical response from people when you engage with with those and in the past and you say like look this is however it is well of course um when I was meeting with people and in my particular ethnic group I mean we're kind of belong back because I mean like $32,000 like that's me like that's what these statistics say I should be making but I mean it's typically particularly for a profession that should be making this much money um so I'm not really sitting down because I am a computer scientist but for somebody who might be in art somebody who might be in English or or math or something else I think it hits them hard because they're not actually in the field um when I speak to people who aren't black and Latino like the Latina uh they're not affected as much I mean of course it does they couldn't get out of it well um there was a particular program that I participated in at the physical computer conference engagement and this program uh it had two tracks one called the the online and one called superhighway so it kind of already solved the problem that I stated earlier about um separating students from the general program and I mean to do uh sometimes new or or lower quality tasks well not lower quality but easier things that I'm going to be able to grasp by the end of the program and give them started in how performance can be um I would kind of want to give you like something like that so there's students who are interested but didn't really know much could come in and learn something but students who already were prepared could uh insert into the general program and compete for awards in any event