Engineering the Future
Jenny Donaldson is at the vanguard of efforts by Montgomery College to help boost the number of U.S. engineers, especially among women and minorities

By Caitlin Gibson
Sunday, June 3, 2007

IT'S A THURSDAY MORNING AT 9:15, the week before spring break, and Jenny Donaldson is one of a group of 17 students in her physics class at Montgomery College in Rockville watching their lab instructor demonstrate how to use an instrument called a cathode ray tube.

One of only three women in the room, Donaldson leans forward to get a better view, then picks up an instruction pamphlet and heads back to her work station. She surveys the equipment in front of her: a diagnostic oscilloscope, perhaps the most common instrument in science.

The metal box, sprouting an abundance of intimidating wires and knobs, is used for everything from medical image displays to automobile repair. Donaldson and her lab partner will use the oscilloscope to manipulate a beam of blue light particles projected by the cathode ray tube onto a screen, similar to the basic technology behind a TV or computer display.

A willowy young woman in a turtleneck with her light brown hair swept back in a ponytail, Donaldson could pass for a high school student. But she's a 22-year-old mother of a toddler and a full-time undergraduate at Montgomery College, where she is studying aerospace engineering, a rigorously competitive field dominated by men. Sitting at her lab table, carefully reading the instructions and adjusting the dials on the oscilloscope, she is a picture of concentration.

This class is just a small part of an ambitious game plan for Donaldson. After completing a second year at Montgomery College, she plans to transfer in 2008 to a four-year institution for a bachelor's degree in engineering. Ideally, Donaldson says, she hopes to attend graduate school before launching a career designing and building spacecraft.

"I'm a hands-on person," she says. "I didn't just want to look into a telescope for the rest of my life, so that's why I chose engineering. I really want to make a contribution."

The path to Donaldson's dream career has been rocky. A few years ago, she graduated from George Mason High School in Falls Church with a 3.8 GPA and a transcript that reflected her love of science, with International Baccalaureate courses in calculus and physics. But after enrolling at American University, she still had no idea what she wanted to do with her life.

"I just picked a school and went," she says. Her lack of direction led to sliding grades, and, after three semesters at AU, she took a leave of absence in the spring of 2004 to work full time at the CD Game Exchange in Tenleytown. That summer, she discovered she was pregnant by her longtime boyfriend, who works as a private landscaper.

Last spring, bored by her work and with her young daughter finally sleeping through the night, Donaldson decided it was time to get back on track. She first heard about Montgomery College from a friend who told her of his own experience there, emphasizing his surprise at the availability and enthusiasm of his professors.

"He wasn't an engineering student, but he told me almost every class he took was like that," Donaldson says. "That was what made me start to look into the program."

The school's engineering program has such an impressive track record for attracting good students that it recently received a competitive, three-year, $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to increase the number of women and minorities pursuing degrees. Nationally, enrollment in engineering programs has been decreasing since hitting a peak in the mid-1980s, according to Sanjay Rai, instructional dean of science, engineering and mathematics at Montgomery College. In a technology-based global economy driven by innovation in science and engineering, the long-term consequences of this trend could be significant, he says.

"The numbers are against us," Rai says. "China is opening several new universities just to teach engineering. India is doing the same thing. South Korea produces the same number of engineers as the United States, and their population is one-sixth of ours."

The United States relies heavily on recruitment of foreign-born talent in the science and engineering fields. During the last 15 years, one-third of the Nobel Prizes awarded to those working in America in science, engineering and math went to individuals born in other countries.

Montgomery College's engineering enrollment has doubled over the last eight years, with 750 declared engineering majors last fall. Pending the approval of state funding, the Rockville campus plans to break ground in summer 2008 on a $60 million science center, which will include space for the engineering program.

The enrollment spike fits a larger trend. After years of students shunning community colleges for four-year universities, exorbitant tuitions at the latter are spurring more people to earn credits at a community college first. As a result, Montgomery College has been able to recruit stronger students and top-flight faculty. Of the 22 full- and part-time engineering professors at Montgomery College, 15 have PhDs. Their degrees come from prestigious schools -- the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and Johns Hopkins, to name a few -- and their students frequently transfer to impressive four-year programs. The most common transfer destination is the University of Maryland; students have also gone on to earn degrees from MIT, Georgia Tech and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The transition for most students is smooth, says Muhammad Kehnemouyi, chairman of the Engineering Department. "The first two years at Montgomery College, compared to the first two years at a four-year university, are identical," he says.

In creating its grant program a few years ago, the U.S. Department of Education was heeding a recent call to Congress by the National Academy of Engineering to support efforts to double the number of engineering graduates by 2015. That can't happen without greatly increasing the number of female and minority students, as well as the number of engineering students at community colleges, Rai says. Forty-five percent of all professional engineers now begin their education at a community college, according to Rai.

"That's why I say that if we fail, everything fails," Rai says.

Women account for 11 percent of the engineering student population at Montgomery College. The program has roughly equal percentages of Asian, black, Hispanic and white students. The average age of engineering students is 22, and about 10 percent are over age 30, according to college officials. In addition to boosting the number of female and minority student transfers to four-year engineering programs, the school plans to use the grant to strengthen recruitment at local high schools. The college also hopes to establish more agreements with four-year institutions that ensure that its engineering courses are accepted for credit when students transfer. Under an agreement with George Washington University, Montgomery College engineering students with at least 60 credits and a 3.7 GPA are eligible to receive a $20,000 annual scholarship.

In many ways, Donaldson is just the kind of student the college hopes to attract. She has a 4.0 GPA. In May, she received the Frank L. Verwiebe Award for Academic Excellence in Engineering, an annual prize presented by the school to three outstanding students.

Donaldson says she has always been treated as equal to her male peers at Montgomery College, but nonetheless, she feels some pressure as a female student. "I don't think most people believe women aren't smart enough, but I want to make sure they don't start," she says.

A stargazer and a puzzle solver, Donaldson says she has been fascinated with space sciences for as long as she can remember. "I can say I have spent many nights looking up at the sky and wondering what new things we might discover out there," she says. Engineering offered the most direct way to channel her passion into a career. But with a child to support, price mattered, along with the quality of the program. "If there hadn't been an option like this, it would have been much harder for me to go back," she says. "I had to know that I'd be able to afford it . . . and juggle everything else." Federal and college aid covers her tuition and textbooks.

Donaldson's day begins at 7 a.m. in the Takoma Park apartment that she shares with her boyfriend. It continues all day with classes and her part-time job as a math tutor. It usually ends around midnight, after she has put her 2-year-old daughter, Olivia, to bed and finished her homework. Olivia is watched during the day by her grandparents. Despite the busy schedule, Donaldson has no complaints. Sitting on her living room couch with Olivia in her lap, enjoying the unseasonably warm breezes of a March afternoon drifting through an open window, she looks perfectly content. Fresh from a nap, Olivia points sleepily at a favorite pair of striped boots sitting by the door and says in a sweet, singsong voice, "Oveeva shoes."

Laughing, Donaldson explains that Olivia, who calls herself "Oveeva," has a habit of narrating her life in the third person. She smiles at her daughter, and contrasts her life now with the moment that she and her boyfriend learned she was pregnant. "We were thinking, what are we going to do . . . our lives are going to be totally different," she says.

But now that Donaldson has found direction, the worries have subsided.

"We're just happy," she says. "We just have fun, the three of us."

Caitlin Gibson is a writer who lives in Washington. She can be reached at gibsonc@washpost.com.