The year was 1979, and senior Carl Mack was taking pre-calculus at his Mississippi high school. He earned good grades, but didn’t see how he would use the concepts he was learning.
“I don’t understand why we take this much math,” Mack recalls saying to his math teacher. “I’m not going to need this when I go to the store to figure out how much change I need to get back.”
His teacher told his counselor about Mack’s math doubts, and the counselor called the engineering department at
Mississippi State University to let them know that he knew someone who would make a good engineer –– the student just didn’t know it.
The counselor pushed Mack into engineering, a subject he knew nothing about. But Mack decided to pursue it anyway.
“I thought I was going to Mississippi State to learn how to drive a train,” Mack said. “That’s how much I knew about engineering.”
Mack learned how to use drafting instruments such as T squares and how to spell “thermodynamics” while studying for his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. Then he did a co-op, a paid internship, with John Deere in Iowa during his first summer break.
“I was hooked after that because I was making more money after my freshman year than my mother was making,” Mack said, “and the labor wasn’t hard.”
After he graduated, he moved to the Seattle area and took an engineering job with
METRO –– King County, where he stayed for 18 years.
Mack didn’t want other black kids to be left in the dark about engineering as he had. He became the executive director of the
National Society of Black Engineers in 2005 and started a three-week summer camp in Washington, D.C., two years later to get students excited about engineering.
Engineering fun
The students write proposals, sketch ideas and create models for speed or distance, among other things. Then they compete to see how their models work. At the camp, black college engineering students act as teachers, mentors and role models.
These camps are important because not many black students know anything about engineering, Mack said, and what they do know isn’t very attractive –– they think it’s for nerds.
“It is a cerebral
career,” Mack said. “We make no mistake about it, we don’t apologize for it.”
But it’s also fun. About 300 kids and 70 mentors show up at each camp in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio, and many of them come back the next year. Sponsors foot the bill so the kids don’t have to.
Mack said some people tell him, “Well, Carl, it’s too expensive,” to which he responds, “No, what’s too expensive is these kids going to prison, that’s what’s expensive.”
Teaching future generations
Many of the students who participate in the camp know about
black basketball stars and entertainers, but they don’t know about many black engineers.
Most blacks who start an engineering career don’t try to help the younger generation pursue science, technology, engineering and
math fields, Mack said. He is trying to change that through the engineering society’s camps and other programs.
“I’m challenging them to come out,” he said, “and stop being invisible to our children and our community.”
A middle school student starts building a motorized car at a 2008 Summer Engineering Experience for Kids camp in Columbus, Ohio.
