Creating IT Futures Blog, 3/17/2014 (Dr. Craig Brown)

Early Guidance Positioned Craig Brown for Success. For the most part, the person in charge of Craig Brown’s daily life in high school was his mother. It was Mom who determined what young Craig ate and his curfew time on weekend nights. It was Mom who decided whether he’d done his chores and deserved an allowance for the week.

But Brown’s class schedule — that was Dad’s turf.

Brown leaned toward the humanities and signed up for as many music and art classes as he could.

That’s when Dad got out the red pen.

“Whenever I submitted my class schedule, my dad always changed it. He left one (humanities class) and took out the extras.” Study halls were also in the center of Dad’s chopping block. In their place, the senior Brown penciled in extra math and science courses.

“I always had two math classes and a science, or two sciences and a math,” recalls Brown, 45, who is now the senior partner of a successful IT consultancy business and the newest national president of BDPA.

Read the rest of the Creating IT Futures article here.

Related articles

• BDPA iRadio Show: January 28, 2014 (Dr. Craig Brown)
• Technology Expresso Cafe': Dr. Craig Brown (February 6, 2014)

Creating IT Futures Blog, 2/24/2012 (Julius Clark)

In IT Security, Clark Found His Stage.  Of all the new directors on the board of the Creating IT Futures Foundation, Julius Clark certainly has the most broadly defined IT career. 

And, to think, it started almost by accident.  Clark grew up in Boston’s Roxbury Madison Park neighborhood. During his high school’s junior year, a teacher casually invited him to sign up for the computer-programming course he was teaching. Julius went along. “I was intrigued.”

Turns out, programming was a fun challenge Clark had never encountered.

“There was this whole different level of thinking. You set your variables, and you didn’t have to play with the numbers anymore. We learned BASIC, Turbo Pascal, but he’d let us take breaks to play games on the computers. One of the most complex programs we had to write was to simulate the Space Shuttle launch sequence.”

Read the rest of the Creating IT Futures blog post.

Digital Journal, 2/23/2012 (Julius Clark, Hayward West)

Creating IT Futures Foundation Elects 2012 Board of Directors.  The Creating IT Futures Foundation has elected its 2012 Board of Directors, adding three new faces to the group. 
  Julius Clark of Wells Fargo Bank; Diana Ermini of OnForce; and Hayward West of Deloitte Consulting were selected to help guide the Foundation as it continues as the philanthropic arm of CompTIA and deploys its new IT-Ready Apprentice Program in its first two locations, Cincinnati and Minneapolis / St. Paul.


Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/596881#ixzz1nDq6rAZF

Creating IT Futures Blog, 9/27/2011 (Khalia Braswell, Stephanie Brown, Julius Clark, David Gottlieb, Reginald Jamerson, Dennis Rankin)

Julius Clark

It's Time to Show IT Off. The thing is, if material success is important to a person, then a kid could do a lot worse than to follow a career in information technology (IT). For example, it was recently reported that mobile app developers are pulling in six figures — whether they had a college degree or not.

Six figures for someone in their 20s! Hey, that seems like rap star status to me.

Julius Clark thinks so, too. Clark is the president of the Charlotte (N.C.) Chapter of the Black Data Processing Associates (BDPA), a professional technology organization formed in 1975. I was introduced to Julius over the summer when Creating IT Futures Foundation partnered with BDPA's own foundation to award $10,000 in scholarships.

Read the full Creating IT Futures Blog post.

CompTIA Blog, 8/31/2011 (Stephanie Brown, Charles Eaton, Wayne Hicks)

Two Foundations Team Up to Provide Scholarships for Talented Minority Students. By the time she had graduated from Stanford University, Stephanie Brown had already completed internships with Fortune 500 companies Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Deloitte. She was only 21. Getting connected with BDPA in high school put Stephanie Brown on a learning track that led to a managing stint at Microsoft.

Says Brown: “Here I had all these awesome role models. It was a turning point in my life.”

Brown attributes much of her success to an organization that has been quietly helping African American students succeed going on four decades. Today with chapters in more than 40 cities, the Black Data Processing Associates (BDPA) has been helping middle school and high school students develop interest and acumen in technology fields such as IT in which minorities (and women, for that matter) tend to be under-represented.

Read the full CompTIA Blog post.