ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

Engineering
John D. Terry - Video Clip Transcription
Clip 1 - Introduction to Advanced Math: I remember at that point I fi rst got introduced to problem solving
and math, it would give us, effectively it was giving us algebra problems. I didn’t know at the time they were
algebra problems, I didn’t have the tool set to solve them, and if you got them right, you got like ice cream, or
a dollar, or something like that. And every day I would go home and diligently try and spend hours upon hours,
trying to fi gure out these problems. And I got a fair share of them correct and sometimes I didn’t, and some
people just didn’t care, it wasn’t, like, required. But then I could really start to see that I really had an aptitude
for math, mostly math, there wasn’t a whole bunch of science at that time. So then when I got to the seventh
grade and I was in Pre-Algebra and they started teaching us some of the tools to solve the problem, I was so excited,
I went back to my sixth grade teacher to explain to him, “Oh, now I understand how you go about solving
these problems, things that took me hours to do, I could solve in fi ve minutes.” And I thought that was a great
achievement, you know, things that I had to puzzle out, and I thought wow, that’s wonderful, you know, with
the right training, it’s so much more you can do than trying to fi gure everything out yourself. And that was a big
jump for me at that time.
Clip 2 - Achievement in High School: I got myself into physics and in the beginning of the year, you take a
test, and it’s like a standardized test to see where students are and then at the end of the year, you take the same
test, and they see how much progress you made. And so at the end of the year, in the physics class, they said
that people, well, they asked the class, you can get graded one of two ways: you can either get graded on how
much you’ve learned, or your absolute score, and they said, it turns out the same person got the highest score either
way you do it. And that was me. I got the lowest score in two different classes when I fi rst got in there, and
I got the highest score in two different classes by the end of the year. So I made the most progress and had the
most absolute [score]. And in calculus, I averaged one semester, I had a hundred and fi ve average for the semester.
I wasn’t working, I had lost my job, wasn’t working. So, I put all my energy into math and science and so I
got, you know, so I was top, top tops in the math and science. Overall I wasn’t, I was nowhere close, I was like
number thirty out of three hundred something students in my graduating class.
Clip 3 – Goals: I really liked electrical engineering. In fact, I had decided to be an electrical engineer in the
eighth grade. I had really decided early on, and I had already planned my career out: what I needed to take and
what classes I needed. So I’ve always been kind of in control and I’ve always kind of planned my life about fi ve
years ahead. I have long-term goals and short-term goals. I have goals all the way down to weekly goals and
daily goals, and the way I got through school is that whenever I made my weekly goals, I would reward myself,
and my reward to myself was treating myself to a banana split.
Clip 4: - NASA Program: Even though I got inducted into the National Honor Society in college, I was like
only the one… I was like only two black guys in the whole induction class in my sophomore year. You know,
I started to feel like I was starting to really do something that wasn’t that easy to do. And you know, I really
started to feel like a little bit proud of myself, but I still wanted to keep that edge. And when it was time to go
to graduate school, [I thought] you know, any old clown can get a B.S. in electrical engineering, you know,
and I had a job at NASA lined up…I came from Old Dominion, Old Dominion is okay for a southeast coast,
but NASA people [came] from Purdue, Notre Dame, the Ohio State, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
All these big, big schools and here I got tossed back in that same familiar environment where I have to prove
myself again, which is just the right breeding ground for me to excel. And that fi rst year, I won an achievement
award for saving the government like $300,000 for an idea that I worked on…NASA Glenn, NASA Lewis at
the time I was there and that was actually a really interesting program because NASA purposely went out to
create diversity in their recruitment. And so it was a whole bunch of us in [there] and there used to be a picture
at the Cleveland Hopkins Airport and there was a picture of the whole group and I was the only one… I was
always missing from the group because I was always working and missed the photo shoot. But that whole group
of people, it’s interesting, if you can ever get a copy of that and track…they went to the University of Puerto
Rico. They got people from all over the country from schools up in New York. If you track the careers of that
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