Half Salary, Full Heart • Aisha Lawrey

(Senior Director, NACME || MD USA)

“I’d never even heard the word ‘engineering’ until junior year of high school. Until that point I said I was going to be a lawyer because I was on the debate team, I liked to talk a lot, and lawyers looked glamorous on TV. But when my math teacher gave me a simple definition — engineering is using math and science as tools to solve problems — suddenly I had a name for what I wanted to be! She took me to tour the campus of a tech college and helped me make that next step — I was the first person in my family to go to college, so without her it would have been the blind leading the blind. I went to school with a majority of people who looked like me — North New Jersey was mostly Black and Hispanic. When I went to college at a predominantly white institution to study electrical engineering, I realized I was underprepared, even though I’d graduated from a science magnet high school as valedictorian.

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My idea was you get out of college and get a job. So I went into consulting, and worked in a technology group to help companies make systems communicate with each other. I worked with a lot of companies, and consistently saw there weren’t many women or minorities. I began to volunteer to go to college fairs and diversity conferences for the company, and noticed something start to shift — I’d wake up every day excited about the volunteer work. So I decided to leave consulting, and worked at New Jersey Institute of Technology to build education resources like career fairs and parent workshops, right in the community I grew up in — it was full circle. Now I’m at NACME — I’m designing support programs for minority scholars studying engineering, partnering with companies to provide professional development and technical training.

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There were times I second-guessed myself on this career path. People would say, ‘You’re leaving engineering — are you crazy? You’re cutting your salary in half!’ But it’s because I practiced engineering that I can do my job well now. I can say to an engineering student, ‘I understand why this is tough.’ And every day I wake up excited about what’s to come, about how I can make an impact for these students.”