Lifetime Achievement in Academia
Minority Engineering Program Director of the Year
Amy L. Freeman, Ph.D.
Assistant Dean of Engineering Diversity, The Pennsylvania State University
Amy Louise Freeman grew up as one of eight children of a minister, in a small town in rural Washington State. If it weren’t for prayer, she may never have become an engineer.
“I said to my mom, ‘I want to be an architect.’ And my parents said, ‘We’ll pray about it and see if God says yes. We don’t know any women in architecture.’ A week or two later, they said, ‘God said OK,’ and I got a chance to be that,” she recalls.
Dr. Freeman became the only black woman in the construction engineering program at Washington State University. But finding her niche after graduating in 1982 was difficult. First, she became a construction manager for a nuclear project for Rockwell International. When that job was done, she went to graduate school at Penn State and ran its engineering tutoring programs for a year as a part of her assistantship. Then she returned to private practice as a business owner, first working as a building contractor and then launching her own engineering consulting business. In 1991, Freeman completed graduate school, earning a master’s degree in architectural engineering at Penn State, and began directing cultural diversity programs at Lock Haven University. That is where she found her academic calling.
“Lock Haven is a liberal arts institution that accepts a large percentage of the students that apply,” says Freeman. “Watching these students transform into these incredible, bright young adults who believe they have a chance to succeed in life and try to help other students was incredibly rewarding.”
In 2000, Freeman returned to Penn State as director of Multicultural Engineering Programs, recruiting minority students from around the world and developing the kinds of support programs that would produce confident, successful black, Hispanic and Native American engineers. In 2004, she became assistant dean of Engineering Diversity and last year earned her doctorate in work force education and development.
Dr. Freeman has become one of the world’s foremost experts on providing STEM educational opportunities to underrepresented minorities and women.
“A lot has changed for the better,” she says. “I can see so much progress…. Although issues of race are still a large consideration, educational access has gotten better. And that’s a very, very good thing.”
Roger Witherspoon is a journalist and author based in New York.