Raphael Charles is a senior project coordinator at Moody Nolan, the largest Black-owned architecture firm in the United States. Charles has experience being an engineer but decided to become an architect.
Charles was present at the 50th annual National Society of Black Engineers convention and spoke with rolling out about the value of an engineer and the reasons he would suggest someone to become an engineer.
What is the impact of seeing a Black engineer?
We’re still in the single digits in terms of the percentage of Black engineers, and less than 2 percent of all licensed architects are Black — and that’s a product of what we know. It’s critical that at a young age, you’re exposed to these industries and these features. I think seeing a Black engineer helps young, aspiring creatives to know they can become one, that they don’t have to conform to societal norms and that they can wear their hair the way it is. You can be your authentic self but still do quadratic equations and advanced calculus and physics and thermodynamics. We’re capable of more, we just need to know that we are — and seeing is like 90 percent of believing.
What three reasons would you suggest to someone to become an engineer?
I have a lot of friends who are engineers, and number one, I would say is their quality of life. My daughter is 4 years old. I say all the time that she has two choices: she can go into medicine or she can be an engineer. You can choose whatever you want within there. You can design robots. My friends are nuclear physicists. I know friends who work for NASA or Boeing … they’re literally rocket scientists and … are the most down-to-earth people that you can ever meet. The career possibilities are almost infinite.
There [are] about 30 percent of the people who go into engineering that will actually matriculate and graduate from school, let alone stay in the industry. A good friend of mine who’s running for a national position went to MIT for engineering, but he has his master’s in architecture and is practicing to get his license. You can go into finance; you can go to med school; you can go to law school; and you can pivot0. I think it has the most professional flexibility out of any career choice that I can think of; you can virtually do just about anything with it.
If math and science are something that you excel at — that you become very good at when you work hard, if you’re good at studying, if you’re great at solving problems, if you’re creative and you want to do something that speaks to what you feel you do naturally better than most other people — engineering is a great opportunity. It’s almost limitless [in terms of] what you can do [with it].
