The National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) is an organization comprised of undergraduate and graduate students, professionals, parents and educators.
According to NSBE.org, it takes pride in living up to its mission to increase the number of culturally responsible Black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally and positively impact the community.
On Saturday, both Florida A&M and Florida State NSBE members led a 10 a.m.walk followed by a carnival at noon. Their goal was to engage and educate the community about STEM and the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering.
Kayla Edwards, the program’s chair for NSBE, oversees all events at the college, and she shared the importance of organizing a successful event.
“This is a community event to basically expose STEM to kids to get them engaged so that they will likely do it in the future if they have an interest in the future, because a lot of them don’t always get the exposure. So bringing awareness to educate our community is part of what we aim to do,” Edwards said.
A lot of communication, emailing and following up with constituents is essential when organizing a successful event, she added. However, it is not exactly the initial aspect, but it is the continuation of it all. There were food vendors and other organizations that participated. The event also required a budget,and accumulating the necessary funds to make it all run smoothly, Edwards said.
Not only was this event educationally informative but it was also inclusive for kids, parents, collegiate and community organizations. The event included field games, food, music, dancing and socializing.
Ashley Rosado, the president of the Zeta Beta Chapter of Omega Phi Beta sorority at FSU, believes in her organization’s mission.
“Definitely, like I said, our motto is ‘serving and educating through our diversity,’ and we value service as much as we value sisterhood, like being able to come out and educate the future generation on things they are passionate about. Today we have a table about aerodynamics, aerospace and paper airplane activity; so just being able to meet students where they are at and make them excited about learning and potentially joining organizations like ours in the future is why we serve,” Rosado said.
Ania Wilson, the vice president of NSBE, shared what her organization is all about.
“Basically, NSBE runs kind of like a business, so we have different zones in our executive board so an event like this is put on by our program zone. Our program zone leader is Kayla Edwards, she actually orchestrated everything and we reached out to organizations on both FAMU and FSU campuses, so that’s the beauty of the engineering school,” Wilson said.
“You have two campuses that are combined so you not only get influence from FAMU, but you get influence from FSU as well. And each school brings different cultures. I like that today you can see the different organizations from both schools bring something different to the table, so you might go to the society of engineering leadership board and they are doing like a little experiment, and then you might go to a FAMU based organization who are doing their own experiment; and it just kind of shows the students who come what Tallahassee has to offer,” she added.