In Black America; Blacks In Engineering with Henry Whittington

Three hundred eyes, two hundred eyes. From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is In Black America. In fact, in 1968 when I went to the University of Houston, there were three or four Blacks to start off an engineering. I spent the rest of the time next three or four years by myself. There was no

others in civil engineering. Here locally in Travis County, I am the only Black registered civil engineer that I know of in this area. There are others in Texas that are located in Houston and Dallas, but there are the numbers of few. Most of the Blacks choose the, you know, the higher dollar paying an engineer, which is the electrical and mechanical engineer usually. As I said, they have the ones that support the high dollar people. They provide the ones like, you know, your TVs and your VCRs and the things that people have money can pay for, whereas the civil engineer provides the the human needs, you know, some of the dirty things like the hell and the, what are you going to do with your sewage and your garbage and your, and those kind of things. So it's an area of engineers, one of the lowest paid areas of engineering, but it's still a very good field of pursuit because it is. You can earn a good living as an engineer. You don't get riches in an engineer, but you have a

sense of pride in everything that you do. Henry Wittington, a civil engineer and former county engineer in Travis County, Texas. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, most engineering fields will grow faster than average with jobs increasing between 30 and 49 percent through 1995. In some fields, such as electrical engineering, the demand will be greater than the 300 or so engineering schools in this country can supply. For the most part, salaries to earn by engineers are dictated by the man for the market specialist in a particular field. Today, petroleum and mechanical engineering are the highest paying disciplines in this profession. Blacks with engineering skills have already demonstrated the power of those technical credentials. A number of prominent black engineers have reached managerial pinnacles overseeing major corporate and government engineering divisions and departments. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black

America. This week, opportunities in engineering with Henry Wittington, a civil engineer in Austin, Texas in Black America. That's the satisfaction of an engineer. There are many engineers that don't get that luxury of actually working on the design of that project and following it on through the construction. Just by every position I've been in, I have followed my projects on through the construction. There's a compressor station that I deal with a lot of design, I deal with the road work, the site layout, the building foundation, the piping. A lot of things are not civil engineering, by the way, but this particular station is down below Franklin, Louisiana, Paterson, Louisiana. It's

where it is. I'm very proud of that station. I have pictures of it. I ride by it all the time. Take a look at it. There are many roads in Travis County that I've worked on and done a design on. There are a lot of others that are on the design now that will become an under construction, but the design on them was done by me under my supervision and actually I do have pride. Scientists and science fiction writers may have conceived these things in their labs and basements, but it is engineers who make them part of our everyday lives. They are the can-do brothers and sisters of our society, the professionals who transform abstract scientific formulas into products, substances and systems that change the look, function, and feelings of our world. This nation's need and demand for the skills of engineers have never been greater, where engineers are needed to run the gamut. First, we can start at the U.S. Defense Department. The universal trends towards computers use shows no signs of abating. Businesses are improving

the productivity of plants and the nation's infrastructure, roads, bridges, sewage plants, and etc. will require $1 trillion in repairs over the next 10 years. In 1985, according to the National Society for Professional Engineers in Washington, DC, the medium income that year was better than $43,000 with young engineers just entering the profession during an average of about $26,000. A top-notch petroleum engineer with five or more years on the job can earn as much as $50,000 a year. Recently, I spoke with Henry Wittington, a civil engineer in Austin, Texas, and former county engineer for Travis County, Texas, Mr. Henry Wittington. I was born in Query, Texas. I'm from a family of 12 kids and it was pretty tough doing those times back there, but graduate of Moscow back in 1968 in Query, Texas.

How did you happen to become interested in engineering or was engineering something you fell into once you attended college? Early in back in my junior high years in school, I would go out and watch the road construction. There was always the guy standing up directing the work. I decided way back then that's what I wanted to do. What type of courses did you take, particularly in high school, that somewhat prepared you to actually once you made the decision to become an engineer, you could actually function within the disciplines that were prescribed for that particular occupation? Well, naturally, I take all the required math courses, all the physics, all the sciences primarily. Also, we had a special course that was provided at high school, because we had a lot of interest from the students down there to take a pre-calculus to course. So that was definitely a course I need to head to engineering. I honestly grew up in a small education system. Some would rule more so than mainstream urban, but also coming from a

big family. How did you divide the time? I'm quite sure there were choice to be done as far as the family was concerned, but embarking on such a career that involves a lot of science, it involves a lot of math, and really not maybe having the same resources that someone else say in Houston or Dallas had. Well, that was a very tough problem. Up until 1966, I was in old black school, which made even tough, and we were integrated. At that time, I went to the old white school. I fell down from top to middle class, I still was in the top 10 percent of the class. I think I was number three in the class, as a matter of fact, but it was real tough for me. Even when I left high school, I thought I was very prepared. Once in the University of Houston, I skipped a lot of the pre-calculus courses and things like that and jump straight on into calculus. I had a pretty tough time doing it, but I was able to match it because it was the kind of thing

that I had prepared for all my life. That was being an engineer, and I knew that math was it, so I did a pretty thorough job of studying around the house, talking about the big family effect on my life. That was a big effect. When I got out of high school, my mother told me, basically, son, I wish I could send you to college, but she had no funds to do that. I then pursued a program called Co-Optive Education at the University of Houston. My white advisor in high school didn't tell me about it, but when I went to the University of Houston, I found out about it, and I was able to get in that program, which allowed me to work every other semester or whatever it took to get the experience and engineering, and this has happened to be with the highway department, the same people that I've watched and been in the construction before. Once you decided on becoming an engineer and deciding on coming to the University of Houston, what was some of the courses that actually prepared you to do the work? You hear a lot of stories,

you go to college to understand theory, but the practicality is something totally different than the real world. And engineering is what you learn in an educational setting, beneficial, and somewhat you do on a practical basis day-to-day? Yes. Most of what I do is technical related. Of course, every engineer for the first couple of years has to take courses in every other discipline's area. A lot of those that were wasted, like a lot of the electrical engineering courses, those type of things. We did have to take the basic courses in those. I try to remember, it was something in particular that I wondered why in hell, I'm not taking this the whole town that was there, but most of the courses that I took were course all courses that I use now. Of course, I'm in sort of a general civil engineering. I do basically anything that falls on that area of civil engineering. There are a lot of the

most specialized at instructional engineering, so there are a lot of courses that they wait, but I use most of them. For those who are not familiar with civil engineering, could you give us some of the job titles that a civil engineer undertakes? Okay. Civil engineer primarily provides human needs. Civil engineers handle your water supply and distribution. Civil engineers handling your sewage treatment system designs. Civil engineers build your roads. Civil engineers build foundations to your house. Civil engineers now are in more environmental area at all falls on the civil engineering. All in gas, pipeline and all that falls on the civil engineering. So it's a pretty broad field. The own shore and offshore piping structural design. I've done a bunch of that in my past. That particular area falls in the area of civil engineering and mechanical

primary, but I think that that's a best pretty good idea of what we do there. It's primarily providing human needs, and I think that's one of the other reasons that I went into it because I am a people-oriented person and I enjoy doing things to, you know, it's most economical for the general public. Most of it can all go for an individual. That's the task of an engineer. In case you just joined us, you're in tune to In Black America. I am John Hansen, your host, and I'm speaking with Henry Willington, a civil engineer here in Austin, Texas. Henry, you were the former engineer for the county of Travis County. Could you give us an idea of what that job was like? That particular job was an appointed position, a statutory position. I thought it was required and the county engineer required. I was in that position from 1985 to 1988. That position basically handled all the road bridges and drainage design for the county,

regularly all development to make sure they met the floodplain program that was more less required by the federal emergency management systems. We handled all subdivision, plattin, permitting. Basically, all of the hard work of the commissioners required. They had that delegated to me for that three-year period. When one thinks of a road as asphalt or cement, but what are some of the thought that has to go into actually putting a road taken design from on paper to actually implementing it on a map or in a street with someone lives? Well, I'm sure exactly what the question is, but one thing that there's a whole lot that go into that road. To get that road done, you have to look at the future uses of their road. For example, if it's a lot of truck traffic or if it's in an urban area or it's in a rural area,

it's where you're going to have a lot of commercial development as a different section of road that you build there. Of course, if it's a lot of truck traffic, you have to put a suitable foundation on it to where it'll have a 23-year life, at least for the main structure of the road. That may be some deterioration on top, but minor. But don't throw you off of one thing that I had in mind. Does the land, which will be used, have a different type of road you're going to build? Say you want to put a road in a certain section or across a certain part of town. Does the land suitability to actually build a road and sustain the weight in which that road must undertake, have any bearing on where that road is actually going to be put? Well, you can build it anywhere. It'll cost you a little bit more. The old one in the eastern side of Travis County has the worst saw conditions. Therefore,

those roads deteriorate quicker because you have the expansive clays underneath the structure there. No matter how, if you can excavate down six feet and when you're talking to clay down another hundred feet, the whole structure is going to move. You're going to have problems there. On the western side of Travis County, you have rock, usually immediately below the ground there. So, naturally, you have a much stronger structure for that road. Politics, as far as where the road is going to go, you can build a road from point A to point B anywhere in town. There may be some cost associated with it. Of course, here in Austin, the environment, if there are trees, you have heck of a time getting the road built if you're building a road for the county of the city. The state on the other hand, if they're going to build a road, if the side of the road is going to be built, use that road goes straight to the right horizontal curvature that it takes for the higher design speed and what it was in the way is going to get moved. With the county, you're dealing

with politicians from earlier. You have to get here to the local environmental standards, which I think are good because it more or less dictates where those roads go and you look at the cost. And if you've got to put curves in to go around trees or you've got to put up embankments to protect it, the cost of that road goes up. So that's the other deciding factor on where the road goes. Speaking of roads, and I'm quite sure the Civil Engineer has to submit some plans to the people who make maps. How often are maps redone as they're done on a periodic basis or as they're done with with the idea of if the monies are available to upgrade these maps on a certain period of time. The maps, of course, the state highway department has a better map keeping system. They keep their maps up because they sell those maps on a regular basis. Condom maps is a map company that's one located here in town. We have contributed money to them to help keep our base maps updated

rather than doing them in-house. Naturally, we keep at the county there, we keep files of every road, every transaction, every subdivision, every new road, every mallet of road in the county, but we weren't able to continually issue those maps. So about every five years is about when Condom map would put out a new map for us. When you were attending college with the other blacks and or minorities and significant numbers in your engineering class and are there similar blacks in positions in which you want to sail with the county here in Travis County? No, as a matter of fact, they're not. In fact, in 1968, when I went to the University of Houston, there were three or four blacks to start off in engineering. I spent the rest of the time next three or four years by myself. There was no, no others in civil engineering. Here, locally in Travis County, I am the only black registered civil engineer I know of in this area.

There are others in Texas, they're located in Houston and Dallas, but there are the numbers of few. Most of the blacks choose the, you know, the higher dollar paying engineer, which is the electrical and mechanical engineer usually. As I said, they were the ones that support the high dollar people. They provide the wants, like, you know, your TVs and your VCRs and the things that people have money can pay for, whereas the civil engineer provides the the human needs, you know, some of the dirty things like the handling, what are you going to do with your sewage and your garbage and your, and those kind of things. So it's an area of engineers, one of the lowest paid areas of engineering, but it's still a very good field of pursuit because it is a, you can earn a good living as an engineer, you don't get rich as an engineer, but you have a sense of pride in everything that you do. Do you see there say renewed urgency or renewed commitment for counselors to at least expand the occupations which are available to minority

and black students because you say a program exists once you got to university using that your counselor back in your hometown didn't inform you that the program exists to insist you to actually attend college. Greg, and I hope that that that is happening. Back when I was in college, this particular counselor, like I said, he didn't tell me anything about any of it because I mean, I was, I was on the, I was in the National Honest Society, I had, you know, top grades in McClaas, all A's, just like the Valence, Valence out of McClaas, but I was not told about any of those cool. In fact, I could have gotten grants. I mean, here I was, here I'm a little kid from a family, raised primarily raised by my mother because my dad died when I was 10 years old and I had no way of knowing about all these things and I do kind of hold a little bit of this to that particular

counselor for not telling me about specifically this co-op program or the grants. The co-op program for the information is a very good program and it is available at, I know it's at Tech Z and M, I think it may be at UT. They'll put, place you with the company in your area of work so that when you get out, that company of course wants first shot at you and I think that's a good good way to get your experience because engineering is the only is good as what you can do in engineering. In other words, you can have all the technical background that you want if you don't have some of that own hands train or natural ability to understand, like I said, strength of materials or all the way things function, you're going to have a hard time applying all that theory that you learn. How can an engineer tell how much cement it's going to need to be used for say a mile of roadway without actually going out there with the truck and putting it submit?

Okay, naturally there, well that's a good question. You have for you the pre-test that already done on the concrete. You can get some 3000 PSR concrete or you can get some 2000 PSR concrete and they'll tell you the necessary water cement to sand to gravel ratio for that particular design and depending on your loading on that particular roadway plan used for that roadway, that determines how much cement you put in that roadway. Do you get on that feeling once you've designed say particularly a roadway, we're using roads where there are other jobs as civil engineers undertake, but once putting that design on paper, actually going out there, they're clearing the pathways, shrubberies or trees may have to be removed, but actually seeing that done and coming back two or three months and actually seeing a road completed and completed to your specifications. That's the satisfaction of an engineer.

There are many engineers that don't get that luxury of actually working on the design of that project and following it on through the construction. Just by every position I've been in, I have followed my projects on through the construction. There's a compressor station that I deal with a lot of design, I did the road work, the site layout, the building foundation, did the piping, a lot of things are not civil engineering by the way, but this particular station is down below Franklin, Louisiana, Paterson, Louisiana, it's where it is. I'm very proud of that station. I have pictures of it, I ride by it all the time, take a look at it. There are many roads in Travis County that I've worked on and done a design on. There are a lot of others that are on design now that will become an under construction, but the design on them was done by me under my supervision and naturally I do have pride in those. Is the future bright for persons interested in going into engineering in general and civil engineering?

Pacific. I think there'll always be a need for civil engineers. Right this moment, you know, things kind of down for everybody, naturally when the when the oil and gas industry went down, it didn't only affect people that are involved in oil and gas, it also affected the economy of the whole United States. So naturally it's down now, but whenever it goes down two or three years down the road, it always bounces back for engineers because the engineer gets involved early on in the process. He gets involved in the planning of something. So whether it's something that's going to happen or not immediately, a lot of times the engineer is done and it's paid for. So I think there is a bright future for all aspects of civil engineering. Henry, before we run out of time for a youngster listening to this program in junior high school, for example, what are some of the courses here as she should concentrate on or at least attempt to do to get them a good feeling as maybe LMI comfortable at this time in pursuing engineering

or maybe other course that I must I should take before I actually make a commitment for engineering. Right. Definitely all your math courses. I would say if you're not good in math and if you don't like math, then no getting to engineering because most of your most of everything that you do is going to revolve around the engineering. And the basic ones are algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and if there's any calculus, it's going to be offered. I think the calculus is in some of the high schools these days, but if not, I think you should urge your counselors or whoever work out the school plan to try to get you at least a touch of calculus in high school because when you go to college, every course is prerequisite of the other. If you get laws anywhere along the way, you may as well as get out of engineering. And of course the physics and chemistry courses are

others that you definitely need. And believe it or not, such courses that teach you about history, all those things, I can see any way that would help me down the road. But when you're really getting to engineering and really studying a particular problem or there's no telling what problem comes to you. And when you know the background of something, it's a whole lot easier to do the best engineer job, which may not be simply doing the calculations and putting a design out there, but taking all other factors in consideration. So just by every course, you take in college, can some way help you be that true professional that you want to be. If you want to be just the person that someone throws calculations to you and you get them done and staying that route the rest of your life as an engineer, then you just take engineering courses. But all this other stuff that you do take in college that you don't think applies at all, I guarantee you, if you're the good engineer that winds up in some managerial position or whatever, you'll use it

down the road. Mr. Henning Wittington, a civil engineer in Austin, Texas. Despite the demand and pay, black presence in engineering in terms of numbers isn't that great. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that there are about 1.6 million engineers in this country, but just 2.7 of them are black. Most black engineers say the condition is fostered by the lack of visual role models, others attribute the low numbers of blacks in the field to the lack of academic support programs for students at many universities. The national drive to increase the ranks of black engineers is a number one concern of many black engineering professional associations. These groups, in partnership with universities and major corporations, are establishing programs to attract and support students who demonstrate that desire to create what has never been. A later in this effort is the National Action Council for Minorities and Engineering based in New York City. If you have a question or comment about this program, write us. Remember views and opinions

expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for a production assistant Betty Rodriguez and technical producer Cliff Hargrove, I'm Johnny Owensson, Jr. Please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America cassettes. Longhorn radio network, communication building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. Johnny Owensson, Jr. Join me this week on in Black America.

Everything you do is going to revolve around the engineering and the basic ones are algebra, geometry, trigonometry and if there's any calculus, it's going to be offered. I think the calculus is in some of the high schools these days. Blacks in engineering this week on in Black America.