CNN, 11/12/2011 (Lisa Chambers, Wayne Hicks, Wesley Williams)

Wesley Williams

Building More Minority Engineers, As Early as Elementary School. As a young teen, Wesley Williams believed his only career option was to work at a local warehouse in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee.

“I wasn’t planning on going to college, I wasn’t planning on graduating high school, I was planning on doing nothing with my life,” he said.

Now, nearly 10 years later, he is a college graduate and an IT administrator and developer.

“I would be either dead or in jail," he said. "Those would have been my options had it not been for BDPA.”

BDPA, formerly known as the Black Data Processing Associates, is a non-profit organization founded to increase the number of minorities in information technology related industries.

In high school, Williams had no interest in academics and spent most of his time hanging out with the wrong crowd. His mother pushed him to join the local BDPA chapter. There, he discovered a love for technology.

Read the rest of the CNN.com article here.