Diversity
Winners of the Student Video/Essay Contest
By the ASEE Diversity Committee
Our exciting Year of Action on Diversity concluded with a student video and essay contest. We asked current engineering and engineering technology students to share a story related to any type of diversity (age, belief system, disability status, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and any other visible or non-visible differences). As hoped, we received a wide variety of entries, highlighting the diversity of our students and their willingness to discuss difficult issues, sometimes in front of faculty and staff from their own colleges. From veterans to international students, contestants shared stories and perspectives on topics ranging from gender identity to race, from visible to non-visible differences, and from inspirational, positive change to areas where change is needed. While their words are often encouraging, it is clear we still have a long way to go. We are pleased to share excerpts from the committee’s top selections. The full versions and other entries can be found on the diversity website: http://diversity.asee.org/essay-contest.
Our first-place winner, Shante K. Stowell, created a unique audio piece that encourages thought and self-reflection. Stowell, an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asked six students if there was one time in their lives when their race influenced their actions. Her intent was to “discover how these answers can help all of us understand each other better.” The question is interesting to ponder. How would you answer?
The second-place winner, Shenwei Chang, an undergraduate student at the University of Texas, Austin, provided a unique perspective on diversity through anecdotes that “illustrate the persistence of sexism in engineering,” as she explained in her application. Her essay “also briefly analyzes the diversity problem within engineering women’s spaces through the lens of intersectionality.” Chang challenges institutions to reform their “dominant microcultural norms in order to create a more inclusive and diverse educational environment.” She states:
As an aerospace engineering major, I have witnessed, through cases of blatant discrimination and subtler micro-aggressions, how deep-seated sexism remains in engineering. Multiple female friends of mine have quoted male peers who insist that women must “have it easy” in engineering due to affirmative action initiatives when evidence points to the opposite: Women often face pressure to perform better than their male peers to justify their presence in engineering. For example, male aerospace engineering students routinely discredit the women’s student organization for the major, assuming that our projects are less difficult than those of the other project-based organizations, which are male-dominated. Perhaps the most telling and egregious example, a friend of mine, the risk analyst and only woman on her senior design project team, was asked by her teammates to “analyze the risk of having an all-female design team.”
Arizona State University’s Samantha Matta, our third-place winner, provides a parallel between diversity and baklava. Matta reminds us that there is beauty in our differences. She states:
The burden of high family expectations that come with growing up as an Arab-American in America seem minuscule compared to the benefits of growing up in a bicultural Lebanese and American home. Truly, the baklava would not taste as wonderful with either of the layers missing. The adversity and beauty of the two separate cultures combined to make something unique and beautiful, something that has shaped me into the person I am today. Life as an Arab-American is not a piece of cake — I guess it’s more like a bite of baklava.
The ASEE Diversity Committee selected Sylvie DeLaHunt, of the University of Maryland, College Park, and the University of Florida’s Brianna Malcolm for honorable mention. DeLaHunt addressed the obstacles facing women in engineering and the positive change that her institution had implemented to tackle the gender gap. Malcolm’s essay describes the time when she realized she was the only black female in her mechanical engineering class but resolved not to let it deter her from pursuing her goals.
Promoted by the ASEE Diversity Committee, the Year of Action is an open invitation to all ASEE members and constituents to engage in activities that lead our profession toward the creative strength, new ideas, and innovation that come with diversity. Let us know of your plans and actions by emailing diversity@asee.org. Please watch our website (http://diversity.asee.org) for updates.
Board Profile
Gerald Holder
A Dean for All Seasons
Over three decades in academe – two of them as a dean – Gerald Holder has become an authority on natural gas hydrates and petroleum; raised millions for research; authored more than 100 scholarly papers; consulted for major corporations; and championed diversity, entrepreneurship, and interdisciplinary partnerships.
Holder, engineering dean at the University of Pittsburgh, stands out among engineering educators for another reason: Along with undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan, his CV also includes a liberal arts degree.
“A high school friend of mine wanted to study art history and asked me to go to Kalamazoo College to see it with him,” explains the former Michigan resident. Holder finished listening to the “sales pitch,” liked what he heard, applied, and got accepted. His friend went elsewhere. Holder, a strong math and science student, “wasn’t sure what engineering was and didn’t have any engineers in the family” but thought chemical engineering sounded “interesting.” So he enrolled in the college’s 3+2 program with Michigan, figuring “I could delay deciding until I understood what engineering was.” Three years did little to enlighten him, he recalls, “but I got to take history of art, religion, psychology, and other courses I couldn’t have taken if I had studied only engineering.”
Holder quickly discovered he “wanted to be a professor more than to be an engineer,” threw himself into pursuit of a Ph.D., which he earned in 1976, and joined the chemical engineering faculty at Columbia University. Moving to Pitt three years later, he became department chair from 1986 to 1995.
“I don’t think I aspired to be an administrator,” reflects Holder, who has rebuffed numerous requests to interview for provost and president, but he recognizes that “the dean has the most influence on the fortunes of the school.”
On Holder’s watch, the Swanson School of Engineering, named for the founder of ANSYS, launched a Center for Energy and the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation, which focuses on the design of sustainable neighborhoods and “green” construction technologies. He has also been engaged in partnerships with the School of Medicine and Innovation Institute to identify, develop, and commercialize promising biomedical projects. A joint engineering institute with Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, will teach the Pitt program in English to 1,600 Chinese undergraduates and let Pitt students study abroad and still stay on course to graduate.
Holder serves on ASEE’s board as chair of the Engineering Deans Council. His goals for the Society include increasing diversity – an important priority at Pitt – and raising its profile in Washington. “It would be nice to have all these candidates for [U.S.] president become cognizant that the organization called ASEE exists.”
Meet Your Staff
At Home with Classic Autos, Exotic Pets
by Nathan Kahl
Joe Dillon, ASEE’s relatively new CFO, is used to being in the middle of challenging situations, in the past dropping in to organizations in need of financial leadership.
Literally in the middle as a child – the fourth of seven kids – Joe was born and raised in the D.C. area. He was an enterprising youngster, buying a paper route from a friend’s brother and later having a mowing business that included 15 yards. “Mom told me when I was in sixth grade that if I wanted to go to college I needed to start saving for it,” a lesson he took to heart. That college turned out to be the nearby University of Maryland and after graduating with his accounting degree he worked in a variety of nonprofit organizations in the financial office – passing the CPA exam in 1984 – most recently as the CFO for the Council of Better Business Bureaus. He joined ASEE in August.
“I’m boring, just like all accountants,” Joe jokes when asked what he does outside of work. His interests include dabbling in woodworking, kayaking with his wife, and restoring classic cars. “The cars started as a hobby that my two sons and I could work on together, and that lasted 10 minutes; they didn’t want anything to do with it.” Joe motored forward anyway, counting a 1960s GTO as one of his favorite projects.
Among the things that make Joe unique at ASEE (or anywhere) is that the now-deceased Dillon family pet was not a cat or dog, but an iguana… a reptile that measured six feet after Joe and family had owned him for 17 years. He would nestle on top of a couch in the sun (the iguana, not Joe), surprising guests who assumed it was a stuffed animal.
Joe and his wife of 37 years, a schoolteacher, live in Montgomery County, Md., not far from their two adult sons. While there are no more iguanas in the future, the Dillons are expecting to become grandparents for the first time later this year.