Native American Students Get Programmed to Succeed : Education: The Eight-week American Indian Summer Institute at UC Irvine provides internships and computer mentoring from mainstream firms for 39 young people from across the U.S.

His long black hair tied back in a ponytail, Carl Lufkins jokes that he’s aiming for a more corporate look.

Not that his mentors at Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. seemed concerned about the appearance of the summer intern. Instead, for a visitor’s benefit, Toshiba employees grill Lufkins, 27, and his colleague Dawn Old Elk, 22, on their four-week jobs at the components manufacturing company.

Both Native American college students spent most of August learning about the flow of data within Toshiba’s management systems--from customer orders to accounts receivable--and studied the computer programming used to move those thousands of pages worth of information through the company’s ordering process.

Toshiba’s systems, built around an 8-year-old IBM mid-range computer, have been updated several times to keep up with the company’s demands. But the older machine did not diminish what Lufkins and Old Elk had to say about their internships, which they described as far superior to alternatives they had back home--in Sisseton, S.D., and Billings, Mont., respectively.

The two were among 39 Native American students from community colleges in the western United States who recently completed the American Indian Summer Institute in Computer Science at UC Irvine. The class was composed of people from 25 different tribes and nations, including Cree, Navajo, Apache and Washoe, said program officials.

The students spent the first half of the eight-week program in UCI classrooms and computer labs, taking classes in computer science, programming, and research skills.

They then worked as interns at 16 Southern California companies, mainly in Orange County. Altogether, 21 businesses have contributed a total of $200,000 to the program over the last two years. The program has also received National Science Foundation grants totaling about $430,000 over the last two years, said program administrator Essie Lev.

The computer science institute is aimed at students from rural areas and smaller cities, who otherwise would have more difficulty learning about technical fields.

The nine-member faculty also hopes the program will encourage students to transfer from the junior colleges they now attend to four-year undergraduate programs.

Ada Shane, a 30-year-old student at Little Bighorn Community College in Crow Agency, Mont., said the UCI classes and her internship at Unisys Corp. will help her pursue an accounting career, a field increasingly dependent on knowledge of computers and programming.

At Unisys, Shane worked with company accountants on a cost-allocating project, and assisted customers calling the company’s help line.

Shane said she had already learned how to use a few basic software programs, such as spreadsheets, while working as a secretary. But, as a mother, it was not easy to balance her full-time job with community college classes and child rearing.

“At home, people are so family-oriented . . . it’s hard to get the focus on school,” said Shane, a member of the Crow tribe. She originally had been admitted to the UCI program last year, but decided that her daughter--then 2--was too young to leave for most of the summer.

Company officials said their student interns helped managers rethink how they operate their businesses.

“We got some sharp students,” said Darrell Lynn, a Toshiba spokesman. “They ask the kinds of questions that an insider tends to forget to ask.”

Gordon Quayle, who works in development services at Unisys Corp.’s Mission Viejo facility, praised Navajo intern Christine Ann Smith, 23, for writing a database program within a week of her arrival.

The interns probably “come in with an idea of what a corporation must be like, that it’s kind of stuffy,” he said. “I hope this is an eye-opening experience for them.”

Despite the obvious enthusiasm of the companies and students, the program does not ensure all its graduates will seek higher scientific or technical degrees.

Of the 60 students who completed the program during its first two years, fewer than a third have transferred or are in the process of transferring from two-year to four-year colleges, said program officials. One reason for the low number is that some of last year’s class returned for additional training this summer, while others are working to save money to help finance four-year degree programs, officials said.

Lev, the UCI program administrator, said the transfer rate is a reminder of the difficulties facing Native Americans, the least visible of minorities in the technical fields.

Of 24,557 bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer sciences in the United States during the 1991-92 academic year, the most recent year for which figures are available, only 81 were given to students who identified themselves as Native Americans or Alaskan Natives, according to the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology in Washington. In contrast, African Americans earned 2,147 of those degrees and Latinos earned 901.

Some of the gap is because of the smaller proportion of Native Americans in the overall population. For the 1990 U.S. Census, 1.9 million people identified themselves as American Indian, compared with 30 million who identified themselves as black and 22.4 million who identified themselves as Latino.

But while the number of science and engineering degrees awarded to Native Americans has slowly climbed in the last decade, it hasn’t kept pace with the increase in number of Native Americans overall--up nearly 38% from 1.4 million in the 1980 U.S. Census.

Russell Boham, director of the Indian Natural Resource, Science and Engineering Program at Humboldt State University in Northern California, said he thinks that another reason for the low representation rate is a conflict between the quantitative approach of the physical sciences and the more holistic perspectives of Indian cultures.

“It’s a cultural paradigm difference,” said Boham, who is a member of the Little Shell tribe of the Chippewa nation in Montana. “Science isolates and dissects. The Native American worldview is more of a holistic one.

“Unless there is a support system, many students will feel like science is asking them not to be Indian anymore, to change the way they view the world,” Boham said. “Sometimes it’s to the point where it feels like science is asking for the soul. Either they find the support that they can do this and still be Indian, or they drop out.”

Institute founder Lubomir Bic originally thought he would focus on the low number of African American, Latino and Native American students in computer classes when he began a five-year stint as associate chairman for undergraduate studies in the computer science department in 1987.

Bic decided to narrow his focus to Native Americans because he said he did not want to duplicate other UCI programs designed to aid minorities, chiefly the Women and Minority Engineering Program and the California Alliance for Minority Participation.

Targeting Native Americans also fit with an interest in the American West that Bic said he has developed since coming to UCI in 1976 to begin work on his Ph.D.

Growing up in what was Czechoslovakia, Bic said, his sense of the U.S. frontier came from reading the pulp novels of German writer Karl May. But after he arrived, Bic said, he was struck by the contrast between the socioeconomic status of Native Americans and the romantic view he had been given by May, who died in 1910.

“May got everything mixed up--he’d have an Apache chief canoeing with a French trapper on the Hudson,” Bic said. “But he had everybody on an equal footing. I liked it, that the Indians had as much to do as the Europeans in his plots.”

Motivated to reconcile the split between the reality and those pulp novel images, Bic began to develop contacts with Native American and community college officials as he traveled in western states on vacations.

Those contacts paid off in 1992, when his computer institute accepted its first class of 11 students, mainly from Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Ariz. Funding for that first year came from the community college, UCI and four local companies, Bic said.

The first year worked well enough to earn the institute funding from the National Science Foundation, which permitted it to expand to 49 students in 1993.

Richard Pierce, director of special projects for the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, based in Boulder, Colo., said more universities ought to consider creating similar computer institutes, because it focuses on keeping the interests of students who have already begun scientific programs.

“I hear of a lot of schools bragging about their recruiting” of Native Americans, Pierce said. “The part that counts is how well they keep those students.”

The internships may be the key of the UCI program’s success, said Rick Tewa, a member of the Hopi tribe who is president of Hopi Technologies Inc., a circuit board manufacturing company based in Winslow, Ariz.

Schools cannot teach all the skills needed to function in business environments, he said. And among minority students, Native Americans tend to have the least access to internships and development programs, he said.

“A lot (of students) come out of community college programs and it’s like, ‘Here I am, now put me to work.’ It doesn’t work that way,” Tewa said. Few students on reservation have access to the technical internships they need to start careers, he said. “It’s a bad cycle.”

As the students left for their homes last week, Bic was back in his office drafting a grant application to the National Science Foundation to extend the program for another few years. The grants also make it easier to raise money from local companies, said Bic, adding that he is “always looking” for new companies to take on interns.

In the new grant proposal, Bic said, he will stress the institute’s blending of internships and course work. “We don’t want our students just to get some clerical tasks,” he said. “We’re proud of what these companies have them doing.”

Computer Degrees and Race

Most of the computer science degrees awarded in recent years to black, Latino or Native American students were earned by blacks. Just 0.3% of both the baccalaureate and master’s degrees earned in 1991-92, the most recent year for which information is available, went to Native Americans:

BACHELOR’S DEGREES

Blacks Latinos Native Americans Total granted 1978-79 505 155 11 8,693 1980-81 786 302 21 15,120 1984-85 2,143 826 139 38,589 1988-89 2,557 902 94 30,637 1990-91 2,063 917 82 25,083 1991-92 2,147 901 81 24,557

*MASTER’S DEGREES

Blacks Latinos Native Americans Total granted 1978-79 65 24 16 2,980 1980-81 70 60 12 4,143 1984-85 180 94 41 6,942 1988-89 218 152 43 9,392 1990-91 303 137 15 9,324 1991-92 334 158 16 9,530

Source: U.S. Department of Education; Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times

Program Sponsors

Corporate sponsors of UCI’s Native American Summer Institute in Computer Science provide cash and/or internships to support the three-year-old program. This year’s sponsors:

Andersen Consulting Apple Computer Inc. AST Research Bowers Museum Canon Business Machines Fluor Corp. GTE Hewlett-Packard Hughes Aircraft Co. IBM Jet Propulsion Laboratory Lawrence Livermore Laboratory Northrop Corp. Rockwell International Corp. Southern California Edison Silicon Systems Toshiba America TRW Unisys Western Digital Xerox Corp.

Source: UCI; Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times