Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) 2026
Becoming Everything You Are
This year’s tagline reflected the power of personal growth, adaptability, and transformation, especially in today's fast-moving age of Al and technological change.
The BEYA STEM Conference, held in Baltimore, MD, honors excellence in science, technology, engineering and math and focuses on equity, mentorship, and STEM career opportunities. The conference is a huge networking stage for STEM employers and professionals, military, HBCU engineering deans, and pre-college and college students.
On this last day of Black History month, in its 100th celebration year, and the 40th anniversary of the BEYA STEM conference, I wanted to share my experience as a Modern-Day Technology Leader awardee at the BEYA conference and how I got there. The Modern-Day Technology Leader award is granted to individuals in the workforce who are recommended for the award by a panel of leaders from industry, government, and academia. In my particular case, my former director (who had been my director since I’ve been with the company until last fall) and my manager nominated me. According to Career Communications Group, people awarded as a Modern-Day Technology Leader “are shaping the future of engineering, science, and technology.” Consistently centering this event and what it represents during the month of February, in Baltimore, is very intentional and I love it.
Besides knowing I’m truly a natural-born go-getter, you may be wondering which singularly distinctive accomplishment landed me here, so here’s part of what was written about me, “She demonstrated outstanding innovation by creating a [PowerShell] script that automated a manual audit log process, cutting the required time in half.” More specifically, the script I wrote is used to copy audit logs weekly from local machines to the server as a backup measure, something that my counterpart and I were doing manually every week which was not efficient because on networks that have many systems, this was time-consuming and error-prone.
In addition to my day-to-day job responsibilities as an ISSM, I also took on the SharePoint site owner and administrator role for my department’s SharePoint page. In this role over the past 3 years, I have coordinated a site migration, restructured document repositories, archived outdated resources, managed site permissions, wrote site management instructions, and revamped the landing page with a total facelift. This is an additional duty that I actually enjoy and have gained new skills by doing.
Aside from being presented with the award at BEYA’s Modern-Day Technology Recognition Luncheon on Friday, I was also presented with a plaque at my company’s private Reception & Awards dinner, both were very special experiences and the food was good! Lol
If you know me, you know I’m not big on being center stage, I typically appreciate and prefer private recognition. However, as I advance in both my civilian and military careers, I have acknowledged that being in the spotlight is sometimes just a part of it and I’m learning to just embrace it. I truly felt celebrated at the conference and I am very grateful for the opportunity to have experienced it all!
Shoutout to my directors and managers who truly see me and believe in my hard work.
Shoutout to my husband and parents who are always rooting for me (my mom watched the awards luncheon online).
Shoutout to all of the other brilliant, innovative, minority 2026 awardees.
