A major activity of the Center for Energy Systems and Control (CESAC) is the development of a research center of excellence in support of power systems automation and control applications.
A secondary activity of the Center includes a summer outreach program to expose high school students and junior college students to research activities in expert systems (ES) and power systems (PS). A six-week outreach program at the Center's facility provides the opportunity for students to engage in learning electrical engineering fundamentals and involve them in the Center's sponsored research activities. The project gave the Center the opportunity to involve high school students in research and engineering education.
Over the years, we have attracted more than 50 minority high school students to the program. Several of these students are high achievers with very high grade-point-averages and the motivation and potential to succeed at the university level. A majority of the students selected scored above 1300 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and have since enrolled in outstanding universities. This is a demonstration of the success and impact of the learning experience gained from the program. To continue this trend, we are proposing a multi-year educational program for pre-college African American students, other minorities and women. To ensure future participation of minorities in science, we plan to increase interest in the engineering profession, which will remain attractive in the 21st century. The program contents include: electrical engineering fundamentals, a variety of research project topics spanning the electrical engineering spectrum (communications, control, signal processing, power systems, materials science and solid state electronics, microwave and antenna), oral and written communication skills, and leadership training and topics on the engineering profession.
The outreach program will be held during the summer for six weeks to include interaction of students, faculty and industry. The program will involve sponsoring agencies representative of our various grants as keynote speakers and high school student mentors. During the school year, the program will allow students to be engaged with research professors at Howard University, participate in science fairs hosted by Howard University faculty in selected schools. The program will also include selected high school teachers who will be involved in technology awareness, problem solving and sharpening of their design skills.
Our experience with pre-college African American students could be bench-marked against our success story of improving both their GPA and SAT scores, providing a positive enabling environment and thus enhancing their chances of enrolling in engineering and could be prototyped for usage by other schools to achieve similar success. ***
