At ABNA engineering, a high-ranking African-American owned engineering company based out of St. Louis, the life-changing possibilities of mentorship can be seen every day.
Nicole Adewale and husband Abe Adewale, who co-founded the company, are long-term supporters of organizations designed to lift up young people, such as the National Society of Black Engineers and FIRST Robotics. They also personally mentor young people and nurture their careers within their own organization.
Nicole Adewale insists upon providing mentorship opportunities within her own company because, she said, “I had that opportunity.” For her, mentorship came in the form of the Inroads program, whose mission is to increase the representation of people of color in corporate America. While involved in Inroads, in the mid-1980s, she met one of her closest friends – now her marketing manager – and found the resources she needed to map out her career.
“I had strong role models,” she said. “Not necessarily role models in my industry, but people who nonetheless found the resources for me to learn what I needed to do to become what I am now.”
“You know, we want to say it’s especially important for students of color,” said Adewale. “It’s not necessarily for students of color. For any child it’s important for them to see in themselves their future.”
For students of color, however, it can be harder to see all the possible futures, Adewale said.
“The problem is that we don’t have a depth of professionals across industries in the African-American community to see us in higher numbers. So for instance, yes, we do see doctors, lawyers, teachers, and also ministers, of course. And all are great, and honorable, and wonderful careers. But then, how many of us know an engineer?” Adewale said.
“How many of us know a business owner? How many of us know, personally, an FBI agent? How many of us know officers in the military? So if you never see that – and it’s one thing to see someone on television, but if you can never see or touch them, never sit down and talk to them and really ask those deep questions, then it’s not as real to you.”
At ABNA, Adewale works with the rest of the leadership team to give students hands-on experience of what engineering is like, and make sure that they see that career as something they can achieve. Personal experience of being an engineer, as Adewale said, can help African-American students expand their perceptions of possible futures for themselves.
ABNA usually hosts two to four interns per year, though the number can be as high as seven. This year, one high school intern from Clyde C. Miller Career Academy has been working at ABNA, along with two fall interns for a specific project, and three young people who are trainees at the company.
“So technically, right now, it’s five,” said Adewale, counting the three trainees, one high school intern, and one college intern currently working there. After their ABNA internships open the door to engineering, these young people go far in their careers, Adewale explained proudly.
“Three are permanent employees,” she said. “We’re very proud of that. One is a civil engineer, working in our environmental department; one is a structural engineer, working in the structural department; and then one works in our materials testing and geotechnical department.”
In addition to those three, many former ABNA interns have graduated from college and continued their work in the field – including one who graduated from MIT last summer.
Adewale plans to share the opportunity to mentor and be mentored beyond the few students who intern at ABNA each year.
“My husband and I have four children, and then young people keep coming to us!” she laughed. “But there’s only so many people that I can touch directly in a meaningful way.”
So, to increase the number of lives ABNA can touch, Nicole and Abe Adewale are establishing programs to formalize the mentorship program.
“We’re assigning people mentors – it’s still in development – and setting some standards for mentorship,” Adewale said. “I’m empowering employees who have the passion for that, to develop it, and then we’ll insert ourselves where we can, to be supportive.”
Younger and newer employees will be paired up with more experienced ones to provide the expert tips and friendly support they need to succeed at the company.
Adewale said that being a good mentor doesn’t take as much effort as people think: sometimes, taking a few hours of your time can be all a young person needs to be exposed to new possibilities.
“When we think about mentorship, sometimes people run away from it because we think that that’s a long, protracted, very involved process,” she said. That, however, is not always the truth.
“There’s a young man, whose grandmother and I know each other, and she said, ‘Can my grandson come and just kind of shadow you for a day?’ And it ended up being a couple of hours,” Adewale said.
“He came into my office, sat, talked, we gave him a tour, answered some questions, and we kept in touch by email a couple of times after that.”
Now, she said, that young man is a lineman at Ameren, with a wife, a house, and children.
“And I know I didn’t do all that!” Adewale laughed. “But his grandmother does say that I helped push him on a positive path, and that’s what, sometimes, young people need. They might know the right path, or the right path may be just right next to them, but they don’t know how to get there. All we need to do is just give them that little push in the right direction, and their trajectory can go into the stratosphere, with just one little push.”
