MacKenzie Scott Donates $50M to Prairie View A&M University
/Writer and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has given $50 million to Prairie View A&M University to be used at the discretion of the President to support the n...
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Letter to MacKenzie Scott
/Originally posted on Medium
I want to thank you for your generosity! Your pledge to give the majority of your wealth back to society is inspiring and reinforces the belief that an intrinsic good is part of us all, even more so, you acknowledging a dichotomy existing in our current social structure. One that is a savior to some, but a nemesis for most. I salute your team of non-profit advisors. They helped you curate a vast list of impactful organizations that deserve every dollar donated and every positive media mention that has generated in result. Thank you!
I write this letter in hopes that you give Prairie View A&M University serious consideration as a future awardee. Prairie View A&M is a historically black university in Prairie View, TX which is a rock’s throw from Houston. This HBCU is doing transformative work in Racial Equity, Gender Equity, Economic Mobility, and Public Health.
Prairie View A&M ranks in the top 3 of schools for black enrollment (over 60% women), the top 3 of schools producing black engineering graduates, the top school graduating black architects, and has one of the best nursing programs in the state of Texas. The university is led by Dr. Ruth Simmons, the first African-American president of an Ivy League institution (Brown University, 2001–2012) and also the first African-American female president of any major college or university (Smith College, 1995–2001).
With most blacks becoming first-generation college graduates, Prairie View A&M has contributed a lion’s share to the emergence of African-American representation across all STEM fields, as well as the income associated with these high-paying professions. I humbly ask that you give “the hill” a thorough look the next go-round. My time there added irreplaceable value to my adulthood, and countless others.
Divers Issues in Education Top 100 Rankings
I look forward to this letter finding you.
Sincerely,
Rashad
HBCUs Are A Better Investment Than Harvard
/Every fall season, we see various lists ranking US colleges and universities. My observation is that these lists are the same ten to twenty schools shuffled in random yet predictable order. If you conduct an internet search for “best college" or “best university”, you will see that the top five schools rarely change. The consistency in many of the ranking methodologies intrigued me. Who determines the best? How is the best measured? It’s not as if schools are in an annual tournament battling for bragging rights, crowned as champion, and hoisting a 4-foot tall trophy in front of spectators. If it were a sport, the current winners continue to write the rules.
The title, best, is subjective. I’ll focus on something purely quantitative, return on investment. ROI determines the gain or loss from an investment relative to its cost. Simply, a school’s cost of attendance is a student’s investment and future earnings are their net return.
According to the US Department of Education, the cost to attend Harvard University without aid is $71,650 per year! This amount is more than the US average income for a two-person household. The cost of attendance includes tuition, room & board, and books. For anticipated earnings, we went to the website Payscale, which states that Harvard graduates with less than five years of experience command, on average, a salary of $74,800. Now that we have a figure for cost and a figure for potential earnings, let’s calculate the ROI.
Is the ROI more than what you expected? Is it less than what you expected? I didn’t write this blog to pick on Harvard, but its reputation as the gold standard makes it an easy target. Harvard’s list of graduates, and even its list of dropouts, include some of the most prolific people in our lifetime. That in itself creates a layer of fantasy that each future attendee is one sheet of paper away from a life on easy street. Seven of forty-five US Presidents had attended Harvard. Those are great odds! If I had to guess, I’d say that one of the next seven Presidents will have been a Harvard grad. Although promising, the chances that one will become President are far worse than any lottery in history, 1 in 300,000,000. You’re most likely to become a movie star, make it to the NBA, or even get struck by lightning than become the US President. In the present economy, some would say that Harvard’s dropouts have fared better than its degree holders.
Now, we’ll look at a much lesser-known institution of higher learning, North Carolina A&T State University. Home of the Aggies, this school’s cost of attendance is a modest $18,136. The average annual earnings for its graduates with up to 5 years of experience is $52,600. Immediately, it’s apparent that one year’s salary covers a great portion of the cost of a 4-year education at NCA&T. Using the same methodology, North Carolina A&T has an ROI of 190%!
Are you shocked?! Don’t be. NCA&T boasts a return on investment 43 times that of Harvard when using the average anticipated earnings and the cost of the school’s attendance, over a 4 year period. The line graph below gives you a better snapshot of what happens during this 8-year period. By their senior year, a student paying out-of-pocket at Harvard has invested $286,600 in his/her education versus their counterpart at NCA&T who has invested a modest $72,544 over the same timeline. Upon graduation, it’s off to the races. With a much less deficit, compound growth works in the Aggie alum’s favor.
I planned not to get too convoluted with attempts at discrediting some of the popular methods used to rank schools, so I’ll save that for later in this series. Do understand, many schools are propped up by weighted values, which are trivial when used as determinants to forecast a student’s future success. Here’s another bar chart with more of the world’s most known Universities compared to lesser-known, but notable ones like Prairie View A&M University, Morehouse College, Howard University, and Spelman College. A national leader in churning out STEM graduates, Prairie View A&M’s ROI is slightly above 130%.
Throughout this blog series, we’ll use data to visualize and express the understated value of historically black colleges and universities. The more you become deeply informed, the more you become cognizant of the roads not taken.
What is the cloud?
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POWERFUL EXPANSIVE AVAILABLE
When discussing “the cloud” with others, you begin to see that many of us have a small grasp on what it’s current capabilities, and possibilities are. The average consumer’s cloud engagement may involve storing their photos to Google Drive or backing up their iPhone in iCloud. While these are practical solutions, the actual “cloud” is so much more.
Essentially, the cloud is a term to identify a global network of servers. Each of these servers has a unique role and operate as one ecosystem. Think of the human body's circulatory system, the immense system of blood vessels communicates amongst each other, delivering blood from end to end. But, in the cloud, the vast system of servers is constructed to manage data, run apps, or provide a service. Email, social media, and video streaming are some of the most frequently used services today. Think about it, none of these services mentioned are installed to your local hard drive. You're accessing them online. This makes them available anytime, and anywhere, with access to the internet.
There are four methods that organizations use to deploy cloud resources. The public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and community cloud. The public cloud can be accessed by anyone, over the internet. The private cloud is private, HAHA. The private cloud offers services too but is only available in a private internal network. The hybrid cloud is a combination of the public and private cloud, which describes most of today's companies. The community cloud shares resources between organizations.
I hope this gives you a better understanding of the cloud than you had 10 minutes ago! Cloudmil is dedicated to facilitating the transaction of valuable cloud knowledge to our clients.
What is cloud computing? from Google Cloud.
Becoming the First Black Google Cloud Certified Engineer in Houston
/With newfound time for most of us staying home, to stop the spread of COVID-19, I’ve decided to share the steps I took to obtain Google Cloud certification. According to Global Knowledge, the world’s largest Information Technology training company, the Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect credential is the top paying technology certification for 2020. Analyzing the list reveals that cloud computing and cybersecurity expertise is in high demand.
Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect — $175,761
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate — $149,446
CISM – Certified Information Security Manager — $148,622
CRISC – Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control — $146,480
PMP® – Project Management Professional — $143,493
See the full list - 15 Top-Paying IT Certifications for 2020
Here are the steps I took to prepare for the Associate Cloud Engineering exam and pass on my first attempt. In order, I completed the Architecting with Google Compute Engine Specialization (GCE) on Coursera, I completed all related Quest labs, and in parallel with both, I read the Official Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Study Guide by Dan Sullivan (a few times).
Complete the Architecting with Google Compute Engine Specialization on Coursera
Complete the exam relevant Quest Labs
Read the Official Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Study Guide
After completing all, I felt very confident before taking the exam. The study guide from Dan Sullivan includes exam-type questions at the end of each chapter. I used these questions as a metric to reread the related content for any questions I missed.
The Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer exam requires you to debug theoretical problems in realistic hands-on scenarios by thinking through the data flows, so having a complete understanding to assess best-case is vital! For me, it seemed as if each question was more difficult than the previous one. This isn’t entirely challenging, think of it as a staircase, each step prepares you for the next one.
Exam details you should be aware of -
There are 50 questions.
Some questions are not scored.
All questions are multiple-choice.
Some are multiple response questions. You need to select all the answers correctly in order to get the points for the question. If you are asked to choose 2 answers of 5, you need to select the two correct answers or you get 0 marks for the question.
There are no true or false questions.
Exam content can update at any time, so study hard and set a personal deadline for you to take the exam.
For more info, go to the Google Cloud Certification home.
You won’t receive your score after taking the exam, which is nerve-wrecking, especially in today’s environment where we expect an immediate response. BE PATIENT. I received my official “PASS” email from Google in less than a week.
Google has a directory of credential holders, Google Cloud Credential Holder Directory. I hope to see you listed there soon! Good Luck!
“I’m an engineer in Houston, TX. I specialize in information systems infrastructure, with a more intent focus on Infrastructure As A Service. Among various Technical credentials, I recently obtained the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer certification. My pursuit began in April 2019, when I accepted an invitation into the inaugural Google Future Leaders of Cloud cohort. The cohort inspired me to take a deeper dive into the Google Cloud Platform as a cloud computing solution. In addition, I’m pursuing a Master of Science in Computational Data Analytics to feed my curiousity in using data to predict.”
