An experienced academic administrator serves as the assistant director of diversity, equity, inclusion, and outreach for the school of engineering. Coming from a large family, her background grounds her approach to education. She earned her undergraduate degree from a prominent technical institute and her doctorate from a major research university, joining the engineering school after serving in a university engagement and research office.
How did your unique background prepare you for this role?
My background allows me to engage in advocacy work through a grounding in personal experience while simultaneously drawing from a researcher’s perspective. As an undergraduate, engineering culture sometimes led to tensions with my identity. My doctoral training allows me to understand how to investigate these tensions and develop new perspectives on approaching complex social problems.
What do you think diversity, equity, and inclusion should look like at the institution?
I think these initiatives should provide equitable access and resources to students and the community. We should recruit our students, staff, and faculty from a wide range of backgrounds and facilitate community development where people can flourish as innovative problem solvers who consider various dimensions. Finally, the institutional culture should be inclusive to everyone in the community and be intentionally designed to make sure community members whose social and cultural knowledge and experiences have been previously excluded are now included.
What are your primary goals?
Assessment, accountability, and community-building. Before any work can be done, it is important to understand the lay of the land. As a researcher, I want to understand what kinds of needs and experiences different stakeholders in the school of engineering have, in addition to a comprehensive understanding of how all the different institutional components work together. Then we can develop initiatives with measurable goals that will help keep us accountable to the academic community. This is not a change that one office can achieve alone. We will collaborate with various entities to work on organizational issues that have an impact on engineering to build community.
What are the biggest challenges in attracting and retaining underrepresented students in technical fields?
One challenge is understanding that students from historically excluded communities have different experiences, goals, and needs. We want to make sure we communicate that we value them, including taking responsibility and ownership of social factors that might have deterred students from technical fields in the past. We need to determine how we as an engineering community can make sure to provide students with agency in their engineering careers. How can we as a community create a space where we value the perspectives and knowledge of historically excluded communities?
What can our community do to support these initiatives?
We are open to all kinds of collaborations. It can be as simple as sharing your positive experiences with high school and middle school students or partnering with our student clubs to support them in the outreach they do. For example, student organizations host science nights at local public schools. Please reach out and we would love to work with you.