... October NSBE Jr Meeting ...

On October 13th, the students in NSBE Jr. had their first official meeting of the school year at San Jose State University. What is NSBE Jr. you ask? NSBE Jr. is the chapter based aspect of NSBE’s Pre-College Initiative (PCI) program. NSBE’s PCI is designed to encourage middle and high school students to excel in math and science and give them the tools necessary to successfully complete college. The NSBE Jr. meetings are hosted by mentors from both San Jose State University and the Silicon Valley Alumni Chapter.












The meeting began with students working through some difficult math problems. One student, Andrea, even volunteered to work through the problem on the board for the other students to follow along. After the students completed their math problems, we moved on to the meeting topic for the month: Robotics. Seitu Barron, a mechanical engineer and member of the Silicon Valley Alumni Chapter, spoke to the students about robots. His presentation included examples of robots in every day life as well as futuristic dancing robots.

The students, ranging from 5th to 12th grade, also participated in an interactive activity designed by college students at San Jose State. The students designed motors using primarily a wire coil, magnet, and battery. Initially the task was difficult, but the students stuck with it and explored ways to improve their motors. By the end of the exercise, all of the groups had spinning motors. Some of the students were so proud of their motors that they took them home for further improvements.

Next month’s meeting will be on November 10th from 10 am to 2 pm at San Jose State. The topic will be computer science and the students will be coding their own programs. If you are interested in helping out, please contact Jessica Miller for details (jessica_miller_52@yahoo.com).

... May General Meeting ...

You know its gonna be real live any time a speaker comes and the first thing they say, or rather scream is WHOOOOOSE HOUUUSE! six house. Charles Lassey of Mili Group Inc, was quite the speaker, a very knowledgeable region 6 NSBE alumni – you would after all expect this from someone who is closing in on a decade of experience in real estate in addition to owning millions of dollars worth of real estate in California.

The icebreaker was entertaining – your basic intro with a couple of questions designed to make it interesting. Now we all know that Seitu and Rommell’s favorite dates are the ones they don’t have to pay for; Angela certainly doesn’t think a date without meaningful conversation is a date and Marcela is sadly letting the outrageous gas prices get in the way of her happy dates – Tiffany on the other hand … slow your roll girl … first date in Hawaii is a little … yeeer.

Charles and Rommell (Rommell was assisting Charles with the presentation of materials) did a pretty good job and they put up a captivating show (not like there were lions jumping through rings of fire or anything). Among the key points Charles stressed on were (and of course this is his opinion based on his experience):

- Ignore all the negative rep. the media is spreading on real estate and real estate investing. The best time to get into real estate is always now

- Shoot to pay the interest and not the principal first

- Borrow smart

- Make sure you get the most bang out of your buck. Financing 10 houses with a million dollars down makes more sense than paying off one house worth a million dollars (There is some math involved in this)

The presentation is available on the NSBE Yahoo Group

As always the meeting was a blast. The nominations went smoothly and speeches/elections will be held during the next meeting. Feel free to nominate anyone or yourself for any of the following positions before the next meeting if you wish to (President, Vice President, Communications Chair, Finance Chair, Membership Chair, Programs Chair, PCI Chair). Look out for the following upcoming events:

June 1^st 2007: Power lunch at Uncle Franks BBQ in Mountain View.

June 16^th & 17^th 2007: Juneteenth festivities at Cesar Chavez park. Silicon Valley NSBE will have a booth and will display a line following robot and hold workshops on sensors.

June 23^rd 2007: June meeting. Nominated candidates will present their speeches and voting will take place. In addition, Michelle Galloway, an attorney and a lecturer at Stanford and Santa Clara University (also a member of the Silicon Valley High Tech advisory board) will give a presentation on patents.

July 7^th 2007: Annual Summer BBQ. Location TBD

... 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!

... Golden Harvest Food Sort #2 ...

The food sort activity this Wednesday was definitely much cleaner than last time. Renee was a little bit disappointed that it wasn’t as challenging as it was the first time around; damn overachiever! Diego actually pulled his act together, showed up on time and spent a record 0 minutes on the phone. Now if that doesn’t define success I don’t know what does. Dinner afterwards at Olive Garden was spectacular. I guess they really do make you feel like family there. I wont get into details but talk of beef medallions, the four ladies from sex in the city and waterfront properties had a lot of people cracking up ... some a little bit more than others ... being easily amused isn't exactly the worst thing that could happen to somebody.

This time around I thought I would present some statistics just to show what effect such an event has on our community. After all, any event held in the name of NSBE should be geared towards fulfilling the mission statement … the relevant part here being “… and to positively impact the community” Now the definition of “community” will vary from person to person … I’ll let you pick your own definition.

A lesson in demographics …

Ethnic breakdown of people receiving aid from Second Harvest
40% are Non-Hispanic White
38% are Non-Hispanic Black
17% are Latino or Hispanic
6% are American Indian, Alaskan Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander

Breakdown of the US population by race
60% are Non-Hispanic White
12% are Non-Hispanic Black
14% are Latino or Hispanic
14% are classified as other

From this, we can see clearly that the black population is much much more reliant on food donations than any other racial group within the US. Gone are the days when we sit down and rely on African American public figures to help drive a positive socio-economic within our community– the Martin Luther Kings have been replaced by the Flavor Flavs, the Mohamed Alis have been replaced by the Mike Tysons and so on and so forth. NSBE IS trying to mass produce the new age MLK’s; are YOU on the bandwagon?

... who reads this crap anyway? ...

I’ve been wondering the same thing. Better yet, who writes this crap anyway? I thought I would take a different approach and post a different kind of entry … you know … something a little bit more techy (for all the guys and gals out there who like to have a Rubik’s cube thrown their way every now and then)

So I track the hits on this page, you know, all that little stuff down to the color of “insert very personal clothing item name here” you were wearing when you got on this page – just kidding. Breathe in. Anyway, among the stats that I pay attention to are: the number of hits, the region of origin and the blog retention rate.



The chart above indicates the number of hits/ our retention. The plotting is done on a week-by-week basis and among the points of interest are the spikes at W31, W34, W38 and so on. These correspond to periods following our major events such as meetings and stuff – makes sense as this is when we would usually send a nice little email saying that the pictures and event update are available on the blog (quite the sleazy way of stuffing the ballot box and getting more “hits” on the blog)



The pie chart above breaks down the numbers – you know – the ones who have stuff to do and the ones who have even more important things to do i.e. read this blog on a regular basis. We see that about 50% of the users are “first time users”. This is a little bit deceiving in that the counter relies on IP addresses and cookies to determine whether someone has visited the site before. In case of the latter, situations where browsers do not accept cookies or regularly dump their cookie loads (I don’t understand why one would not want cookies or even worse why you would wanna dump cookies esp. the heart shaped ones! Mmmmmm. Cooooookkiiies) would throw off the actual number while in the former, visitors on dynamic IP’s e.g. the AOL guys or internal company networks would record as “new visitors” even though they had checked out the site several times.

The short: At least 35% of the visitors read this blog on a monthly basis and another 20% read the blog on a biweekly basis.



Lastly, we see that we have some good faithfuls over in Chile and in the UK checking out the blog. Power to the world man. If you haven’t bought onto this globalization thing yet … you might just wanna jump on the bandwagon … it’s for real. Trust me. The previous months have recorded visits from France, Japan, Tanzania among others. At the end of the day though, we see that the biggest spender is the San Jose resident commanding a whopping 50% share of the blog traffic. Yay for good old Silicon Valley – After all we are Silicon Valley NSBE Alumni aren’t we?



Enjoy the corny ending and have a great week/ weekend!

... Welcome to Phoenix, NV ...

So RLC was held in Phoenix this year from the 11th to the 13th of August (Don’t get on my case for my tardiness – Times are tough and time is really hard to come by). For those who don’t know, RLC (Regional Leadership Conference) is an event geared to those who would like to know more about how NSBE runs and what it takes to run a NSBE chapter.




One of the most amusing things about the trip was the flight there. So it just so happens that Arizona is a state plagued by a monsoon system during summer. So given this, we left San Jose for Phoenix on Friday night and being the extremely busy person I am I blacked out as soon as I got into my seat. A while later, the plane landed and I woke up as soon as the tires hit the tarmac. The very first thing I noticed though was that the skyline was really like whoa! I thought to myself “Wow, the Phoenix skyline has changed a lot within the last six months!” I mean there were lights all over and …




10 seconds later the captains voice goes on the intercom “Folks we just touched down in Las Vegas to refuel just in case we have to circle the Phoenix airport for a while because of the monsoon thunderstorms”. Do I need to say more. I don’t think I have to.




RLC was good (I have noticed that I am really short on my vocabulary – I use “Good”, “Great”, “Nice”, “The Bomb” a lot.) How about RLC was mind blowing! (Then insert a scream here). There were a ton of workshops as usual that will definitely help make the SVC Board a more effective board and we were blessed to have the national collegiate and alumni chairs in attendance, the national treasurer (she was great. Gave us some great tips on investments and how to get on the NSBE investment bandwagon … Oooh, I take that back – She was mind blowing).




So this year’s theme is LOVE.
Leadership and Academic Development
Operational Effectiveness
Vital Technical Excellence
Expanding Career Access

As an alumni chapter, some of these definitely do match with the goals that we set for ourselves as a chapter when we first convened to form the Alumni group. Our initial goals were:

- To recharter the chapter (done)
- To increase membership (in progress – we have grown tremendously so far)
- To offer professional development for members (we haven’t gained much headway in this yet)
- To strategically align ourselves with other black organizations e.g. black MBAs, to form a relationship with PCI Chapters and to form strong bond with collegiate chapters. (We currently have a very strong bond with San Jose State, a working relationship with Stanford, great … MINDBLOWING relations with NCCBPE among other black orgs)




For a corny ending – The thunderstorms in Arizona definitely reminded us of the NSBE lighting bolt symbol and we shall definitely keep striving towards the striking impact that will be felt by the society and industry due to the contributions and accomplishments made by the dedicated members of the National Society of Black Engineers.






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cout << That was sooooooo corny;
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