Cooksey, a Fort Worth, Texas native, was a probable candidate for successor. A Tennessee State University-trained electrical engineer and Vietnam veteran, Cooksey attended the University of Toledo, where he received a master’s degree in industrial engineering. He obtained his doctorate in mechanical engineering, specializing in systems analysis and design, at Michigan State University.

Cooksey launched his career with an assistant professorship in industrial engineering at General Motors Institute in Flint, Mich.  In 1976, he began working at the St. Louis, Mo., plant, where he held several superintendent positions before being transferred to the Doraville plant in Atlanta, Ga.  After working in Doraville, he was named production manager at the Fairfax, Va. plant, where he stayed until his current assignment.  It was only a matter of time before Cooksey received his dream job---running the world’s only Corvette plant.  Under his direction, the Corvette has received numerous awards, including America’s Best, Automobile of the Year by Automobile magazine, Best Premium Sports Car by J.D. Power & Associates, and Best Sports Car by Money magazine in its 2002 car guide.  In May 2002, the Corvette was named Best in Segment for the second year in a row, and the Bowling Green Assembly Plant was named North America’s Silver Plant by J.D. Power & Associates.

Many AMIE officers endorse Cooksey’s election.  For example, Myron Hardiman, AMIE’s executive director, believes it makes perfect sense to tap talent from a former AMIE vice chairman, “because it provides the organization continuity from the outgoing chairman, Dr. Allen Atkins, from Boeing.”  Hardiman believes that AMIE will benefit greatly from Cooksey’s new position, because he considers Cooksey to be “very supportive of AMIE’s mission of developing partnerships between [AMIE’s] member organizations and one or more of the HBCU engineering schools.”

Headquartered at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Md., Advancing Minorities’ Interest in Engineering is a nonprofit organization that was launched in 1992.  The initiative was led by Abbott Laboratories, with support from several other Fortune 500 companies.
 
The organization is a coalition between representatives and engineering professionals from Fortune 500 companies and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) that have ABET-accredited engineering schools.  Its mission is to ensure that businesses have the talent they need to prosper by increasing the diversity of the future technical work force.

AMIE focuses its efforts on its member HBCUs, which graduate between a quarter and a third of the African-American engineering technical degree recipients in the U.S. each year.  Since 1992, over 150 representatives of major U.S corporations and the HBCU engineering schools have participated in the AMIE conference to plan strategies to increase the number of minorities in engineering. Members agreed that efforts to reach future engineers must start before students enter college and continue through the student’s college years and critical first years on the job.

AMIE is reaching more students than ever through “pipeline” programs at each of the AMIE schools, developed with the help of corporate sponsors.  Each university makes contact with students in middle school, encouraging them to get the foundation in math they’ll need to progress to calculus before they graduate from high school. This head start is a huge advantage for beginning engineering studies in college.

AMIE’s corporate-academic partnerships include scholarships, student internships and co-op opportunities, exchange programs between engineers and faculty, faculty internships, research collaborations, corporate advisors to correlate college curricula with emerging technologies, and equipment donations and financial grants for updating laboratory facilities.

Two civil engineering students at Morgan State University, Toria Lassiter and Keith Owens Jr., have already benefited from AMIE’s services.  Jointly awarded by HDR (an architectural, engineering, and consulting firm) and AMIE, each student received a $2,000 scholarship.  These scholarships are a direct benefit of HDR’s Platinum membership in AMIE.  Both Lassiter and Owens will intern at HDR offices in 2006 as they continue working toward their civil engineering degrees. 

AMIE is a matchmaker, encouraging alliances between its corporate members and the AMIE schools that create programs to attract, educate, and graduate under-represented minority students and place them in engineering careers. 

But how does Cooksey’s position benefit AMIE?  What does the future hold for AMIE?  Cooksey’s vision for AMIE “is to see the HBCU’s share best practices that will benefit the student engineers as well as their future employers.  I want to see the curriculum and programs be developed to prepare the student engineers for the best possible future careers.”  Cooksey will carry out these goals through a “joint communication between the members of AMIE and the HBCUs, [as well as] jointly developed curricula and courses.”

AMIE and its partners are always working on three tactics:  They’re feeding the colleges a stream of young minorities with the qualifications to study technical majors; they’re shepherding these students through their college years in a supportive atmosphere; and they’re bringing them out into the corporate world, ready to share their energy and ideas.

African Americans make up 15 percent of the U.S. population, but less than 4 percent of African Americans are engineering professionals, and the technical work force is in desperate need for minorities.  Now, with Cooksey as AMIE’s new chairman of the board of directors, there is hope that more Fortune 500 corporations and government agencies will form partnerships with historically black colleges and universities, thus increasing the percentage of African-Americans in the technical work force.