... Unity Banquet ...

By Diego Dimes, President

It has been 5 long years since the NSBE AE SVC held their last Unity banquet. This was the staple event for the alumni extension in which they gave away scholarships to the best and brightest collegiate and high school NSBE members. This was a special year because it is the first time in 5 years that the NSBE AE SVC has been active. The tech bust destroyed the chapter in early 2000. Since then the new board has been working to revitalize the chapter. When the board decided to have the banquet there were many dissenters. People told us we were too young of a chapter, we weren’t going to be able to get the sponsorship, we didn’t have the membership, maybe we will be ready next year and many other negative remarks. Needless to say we didn’t pay attention to all those who doubted us. The banquet chair Jessica Miller put together an outstanding banquet.

The site of the banquet was a beautiful banquet hall in Sunnyvale, The Historic Del Monte Building. This was not just a hotel with a big room but an actual banquet hall that only caters to large banquets. Leslie Stoval a veteran radio personality from the bay area was the MC for the night. She added a touch of personality to the event.

There was a great mixture of NSBE Alumni, Students and Professionals. Attendees came from the Silicon Valley Alumni Extension, Stanford University, Santa Clara University, San Jose State, Berkeley, San Francisco State, San Jose City College, Canada College as well as from the East Bay PCI chapter. The sponsoring companies: Cisco, Genetech, HP, IBM, J & J, Abbot Vascular, and Kaplan also sent representatives.

The keynote speaker, Forrest Williams, had some strong words for the attendees. He stressed the importance of NSBE stepping up and taking leadership roles in the black community. NSBE represents a large segment of the next generation of black leaders. If NSBE members do not fill the leadership and mentorship roles in the black community many of them will remain unfilled.

Several students left the banquet with a good reason to be happy. Unity scholarships were awarded to 7 deserving collegiate students. The award recipients were each given a $1000 dollar scholarship presented by the sponsoring company. Other smaller dollar amounts were handed out to other students/ persons who excelled in specific categories. Students were awarded in the areas of technical excellence, creative expression, community service, and academic excellence. However, it wasn’t just the college students that benefited on this night. One alumni member left with a $1700 scholarship from Kaplan to pay for grad school prep courses.

The night ended with everyone’s favorite dance, the electric slide. This banquet was a testament to the power and potential that NSBE has. NSBE-AE-SVC was able to go from not having a chapter 10 months ago to hosting a banquet with over 100 attendees; sponsoring attendance of all college and PCI students, and giving away over $9000 in scholarships.

... march general meeting ...

Writer: Angela Adaure Uzoma

Have you heard of Google? Its name is thrown around in the news every now and then, but you know never know with these startups. Well, the little company known as Google hosted our fine organization’s March meeting at their company headquarters in Mountain View. We were greeted with a very warm welcome consisting of correctly-spelled nametags, an abundant breakfast spread, as well as a first-class conference room for our meeting. Our hosts were pleased to be partnered with a NSBE group so…we’re definitely going back! A big round of applause for Miss Sun-Hee and Sir Taylor for playing such lovely hosts!



Molecular Diagnostics…what does that mean? It’s a project that Elvis is working on, and also the title of the presentation he gave at the meeting. In an attempt to introduce more hard-hitting and technologically-focused discussions to our monthly meetings, Elvis bit the bullet and put together an astoundingly detailed and (shockingly…cough, cough…) interesting yet informative explanation of his personal contributions to Cepheid, the company for which he works. Got questions about molecular diagnostics? Talk to the guy in the glasses covered in UCLA paraphernalia.



Also discussed were the changes to the GRE taking place over the summer of this year. A representative from Kaplan (code name: Kaplan Kelly) spent time going over the exact changes that will be incorporated in to the revised version of the GRE.
Breaking News!: It turns out that the new GRE will not happen after all. (No More New GRE!)


The meeting wrapped up with a reminder to sign up for the Walk for Education at nsbe.org and to RSVP for the NSBE Alumni Banquet. Please sign up for both!