FROM THE EDITOR - Science + Math = Success
ANSEP building is a house of winners
ANSEP founder Herb Schroeder has created a path to engineering school by challenging rural high school students to build their own computers.
His students call him Ilisaurri, the Yup'ik word for teacher and guide, and Herb Schroeder's personal story is as educational as a day in his classroom.
"I came to Alaska to work on the Slope," says Schroeder, "and I became an engineer because I figured out that I was as smart as the people up there who were engineers. But I didn't really know much about it. When I got to the university to sign up for engineering school, they had to tell me, 'You might want to go buy a calculator.'"
As an oilfield engineer, he couldn't help noticing there were few Natives in the profession. As a university professor later, he found there were two key reasons. "Only 12 percent of the kids we're graduating from high school in Alaska have the math and science credits they need to enroll in engineering school," he says. "Worse, many teachers and school administrators in rural Alaska have not encouraged Native students to pursue math and science, because they don't think Native students are capable of the work."
Schroeder wasn't having any of that, and several years later he sits at the helm of the Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program at UAA. ANSEP started with a single student in 1995. Since then it's helped 138 students graduate in engineering and science since 2002.
ANSEP points students on a career path in science, technology, engineering and math, with programs that begin in high school and take students all the way to a PhD.
"We started by going out to a high school in Kotzebue and teaching kids how to build their own computers," Schroeder says of an outreach program that had spread across the state. "If they complete chemistry, trigonometry and physics courses by the time they finish high school, they get to keep the computer."
At the college level, ANSEP provides focused learning communities. Students take the same courses together, organize in study groups that last throughout their university careers and gather in a strikingly attractive building "that keeps us a family," Schroeder says (see story, page 24).
The kayak-shaped building and the program have reaped many grants and awards. The most recent: Schroeder won the 2009 Founder's Award from the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which comes with a $10,000 gift for a nonprofit of Schroeder's choice.
In 2001, Schroeder organized "an indigenous alliance" which has replicated ANSEP at UAF as well as universities in seven states.
But high schools in rural Alaska are still the primary focus for his team at UAA.
"Dozens of high schools have bought-in and now provide space for these PCs," Schroeder says. "But we'd like to involve a lot more."
Quyana,
—Mike Peters
Editor
P.S. We'd like to share some good news with our readers: First Alaskans magazine recently won five awards from the Alaska Press Club, for feature writing, overall magazine design, photography and cover design in 2008; photographer Roy Corral took home three awards for his work in the magazine and Alaska Newspapers.