Anchorage Daily News

Editor's note: This profile on Dr. Herb Schroeder was published Jan. 5, 2003.

A frazzled 51-year old white guy from Chicago who started his career shoveling snow at an Arctic pipeline camp is performing miracles at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

He takes raw talent, adds pizza, a buddy system, forced labor, constant fretting, whatever money he can squeeze out of the oil patch and creates Alaska Native engineers.

Young villagers are coming in unprecedented numbers to be part of ANSEP, the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program now in its sixth year, and they're staying to graduate.

Fully 20 percent of the student body at UAA's School of Engineering is now Alaska Native. And the number increases each year.

This an amazing turnaround.

In the 20 years since the engineering school opened, maybe three or four Natives have gotten degrees. No one seems to have kept records or figured out why, but people whose memories go back to the early 1980s say even this estimate may be high.

The wizard who got ANSEP going is Dr. Herb Schroeder, a civil engineer and professor who worked the oil fields and the Bush before becoming a teacher with a mission.

Schroeder's goal is to prepare Alaska Natives for jobs in industries doing business here, like oil, utilities and resource development. Industries with few Natives on staff have complained for years that they can't find villagers with the needed technological training. ANSEP is designed to fix that.

But Schroeder sees ANSEP as more transforming than mere jobs. Native engineers in corporate management positions will be able hire other qualified Natives, he says, giving the culture a new voice in policy that affects them. Along the way, these engineers will enjoy fulfilling lives for themselves and contribute to the success of their villages, their corporations and the state, he says.

Given voice, the program sounds like an obvious winner. But ANSEP had trouble finding its groove. Most of the early students dropped out or, unprepared for the tough courses, changed majors. With no university funding available, Schroeder pitched the program to private industry, to the people who would most benefit from a new pool of qualified job applicants.

He and his colleagues looked around the country at programs designed to attract and keep Native Americans in school. They learned from their mistakes and adapted as they went along. At the beginning, he recruited Natives who had already succeeded in another discipline or college, hoping they would serve as role models for students right out of high school.

Now the hard work has begun to pay off. ANSEP is graduating engineers. One last year. Probably three this coming year. More next year.

Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. president David Wight, whose company was an early investor, calls ANSEP ''a logical place for us to land.''

''It's one of those programs that over a longer period of time is going to make a significant difference to a large part of our population, '' Wight said.

MISSION DISCOVERED

Schroeder found his ANSEP mission at the end of a long road that began in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C., where his father held a variety of offices in the lithographer's union. Schroeder said he enjoyed his young life but was without purpose. Bored and unmotivated, he dropped out of college in 1974 and turned to Alaska for adventure and opportunity.

''I knew there had to be more to life than tending bar and playing rugby, '' he said.

To hear him tell it, he bonded with Alaska immediately. ''As soon as I got off the plane in Fairbanks, I knew I was home, '' he said. ''It was a remarkable thing.''

Schroeder came for a job on the pipeline, but so did everyone else, and they got here first. There was an opening shoveling snow at Toolik, a construction camp north of the Brooks Range, that no one wanted. He took it and spent two years on the North Slope.

When pipeline construction ended, Schroeder worked as a cook at Elevation 92, a now-defunct Anchorage restaurant. But he had finally figured out what he wanted to be when he grew up. Working around engineers on the pipeline convinced him he was smart enough to do what they did. So he went back to school in 1977 and graduated from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1981 as an engineer.

For the next eight years, he worked for Veco, mostly on the slope, building in the oil fields. One of his other jobs involved studying village sanitation systems. Many seemed badly designed, inappropriate for the community's needs, he said. In most villages no one understood how the systems worked well enough to keep them running without expensive outside help.

The biggest disconnect was between the community and federal design engineers. ''There's such a chasm of understanding, it's almost impossible, '' Schroeder said.

To him the solution was obvious: ''We have to make Native engineers.''

MAKING NATIVE ENGINEERS

To make Native engineers, Schroeder had to find students with math and science aptitudes, sell them on engineering as a career, convince them to enroll at UAA and keep them in school. Keeping them was the hard part.

Schroeder and others who work with Native students, especially those raised in villages, say the shock of parachuting into a big scary city, into a noisy alien culture, facing course work their little schools back home didn't prepare them for and living where everyone is a stranger overwhelms many Native freshmen. They feel isolated. Routine problems become big roadblocks. Too often they succumb to homesickness and leave, taking with them a sense of personal failure.

Willie Sakeagak, 23 and a graduate of Barrow High School, went to the University of Delaware before becoming an ANSEP student in 1998. He expects to graduate this year.

Always good in math, Sakeagak decided in high school to become an engineer. He had a good freshman year at Delaware, but in his second year his academics fell apart. He was lonely and depressed. He broke up with his girlfriend but kept running into her in class. He had no one he felt he could really talk to.

''I was probably the only Native student in Delaware, '' he said. ''I was without all the things that are meaningful to me, all the things that kept me calm inside -- family, the food I ate, hunting were all gone. All the support that makes you do well.

''I remember I dared to think to give it all up and go back home. I went to a room for about 20 minutes. I cried because I didn't think I could do it. I cried to make myself do it. Being by yourself is hard.''

''Then I got a call from Herb.''

INVENTING ANSEP

In 1995, Schroeder was teaching at UAA and inventing ANSEP with two friends who worked in student services, Linda Lazzell, who is now his wife, and Cindy Spear. They came up with a plan: Wrap incoming freshmen in a cocoon of support, but force them into real-world internships right from the start to promote job skills and self-confidence. Schroeder wants his kids to overcome any fears they might harbor of the world outside their culture and to discover, as he had, that they are smart enough to be engineers.

The first rule of the cocoon is, no one takes a class alone. If an ANSEP student is taking a course, another ANSEP student or a volunteer mentor takes it too. ANSEP students work together in study groups and share intelligence on how to negotiate university life and the city at large. They use the UAA tutoring program, and Schroeder recruits upperclassmen willing to work with his kids. Until recently most of the ANSEP students lived together in a dorm converted to foster communal living. But the program has outgrown it, and now upperclassmen sometimes live elsewhere.

To accomplish all this, ANSEP needed money. UAA said it had none, so Schroeder sold the idea to Alyeska Pipeline, which offered $96,000 seed money and has continued to provide scholarships; and to Veco, NANA and BP Exploration (Alaska), which provide the internships integral to the success of the plan.

To qualify for ANSEP scholarships, students have to maintain a 2.0 grade-point average while taking at least 12 credits, said Lazzell, now head of student affairs at UAA.

Schroeder knows all his students personally. He keeps a concerned eye on their progress, and everyone has to show up on Fridays for a pizza lunch and information exchange. When the system works, student problems get noticed and dealt with before they mushroom into disasters.

''You're building a network of people who care about you, '' said Viola Stepetin from St. Paul, who is studying to be a materials engineer. ''It strengthens you in that they're going through the same things you are. ... Sometimes it takes one critical moment'' to keep a student from giving up, she said.

Stepetin is in ANSEP thanks to Schroeder's aggressive recruiting. A graduate of West High, highly motivated, she came to college on her own and was halfway through a UAA business degree in 1998.

''I think growing up poor, growing up without a lot of things, really, really motivated me. We were really poor. We wouldn't have food unless my dad went hunting.''

So she enrolled in business school, intent on working for her village corporation on the restructuring of the St. Paul economy.

''Then I met Herb.''

Schroeder heard her make a speech at UAA and approached her. ''He asked if I'd ever considered engineering. I said, 'I thought it was only for really smart people.' ''

That year Schroeder took a group of students to a conference in Houston and a visit to the national space center. ''I met an astronaut, '' Stepetin said, ''a really cool guy. ... I was interested in engineering completely.''

CHANGING LIVES

Thomas Llanos, whose Ketchikan family is Tsimshian and Tlingit with a Filipino great-grandfather somewhere in the mix, arrived at UAA in 1996, the year ANSEP began. He had an associate degree from University of Alaska Southeast that didn't open many doors, and he had a yen to be an architectural drafter. To pay for school he worked as a U.S. Forest Service receptionist, a pizza dough roller and a dish washer.

''I knew I wasn't really wanting a career like that, '' he said.

Llanos, 27, enrolled in engineering on his own. More sophisticated than someone right out of a village, he was still used to small-town Ketchikan, where he knew everyone and they knew him.

''I remember looking around the classroom and seeing all these strange looking faces. I didn't know a single person ... I'm stuck here in Anchorage with these strange people.''

One day, ''this guy comes up. He's got these big eyes, a gray beard. He stood there looking. I said, 'Can I help you?' He asked, 'Are you an Alaska Native? Have you ever heard of ANSEP?' ''

Llanos listened to Schroeder, lured by the possibility of scholarship money. ''I walked into his office. There were papers all over the place, on the floor, on the chairs, books stacked up on the chairs, under his desk, sticky notes everywhere, on the walls, everywhere. He moved some books so we could sit down.''

Engineering is a tough major. Llanos has had to repeat several courses and doubts he would have stuck it out if not for ANSEP. ''You get confidence to try things, to fail then try again. The kids ahead of you are an example to show it's possible.''

Over the years, Llanos has worked summer internships with Veco or Alyeska, and had a winter job last year with the state Department of Transportation. He's helped with maintenance at pump stations 4 and 5, and two summers ago, between May and August, he walked the pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez collecting data with a group that included four other ANSEP students.

ANSEP ''dramatically'' changed his life, Llanos said. If not for Schroeder and the program, he thinks he would have dropped out of school, gotten married and moved to Washington state.

''I would probably be living in Washington and working in some kitchen.'' Instead, he expects to graduate in May.

SUMMER BRIDGING PROGRAM

After their early experience losing students, Schroeder and his colleagues realized that kids coming out of small high schools rarely have the math and science necessary to succeed at even basic engineering courses. It's a problem for a lot of students, not just village Natives, said Prof. Bart Quimby, head of civil engineering at UAA. It takes most students 41/2 or 5 years to complete the four-year program, he said.

So the ANSEP people created a nine-week summer bridging program for entering students. Participants take 20 hours of calculus a week and work 30 hours a week on an internship, Schroeder said.

Marsha Nanok from Chevak is a freshman. Her summer internship was with BP, where she helped build a computer model for transportation of oil from Valdez to the West Coast. She learned, among other things, that she doesn't want a career that is mostly computer work.

Schroeder found Nanok at Mt. Edgecumbe High School, where engineering was so far off her radar that she didn't bother attending his recruiting pitch. Her postgraduate plans were to spend a year in Chevak, probably join the Army and eventually be a technician. Her dad is a phone technician for United Utilities Inc.

The Mt. Edgecumbe principal, who had other ideas, pulled Nanok out of class and made her talk to Shawn Aspelund, BP's ANSEP liaison and part of Schroeder's recruiting party. Nanok didn't know what engineers did, but she loved math, so why not, she thought.

If not for ANSEP, ''I don't think I would be in college now, '' Nanok said. ''I think I would be home, with the rest of my class, taking a break.''

The summer bridging program saved ANSEP, according to Llanos, one of the few students who survived the early days. Kids loved the internships and did better in their freshman courses. They started sticking around.

The program delivered its first graduate last spring, Matt Calhoun of Homer who now works as an engineer on pipeline maintenance for Ahtna Construction in Fairbanks. Three more graduates are expected this spring.

This coming semester ANSEP will have 47 students, Schroeder said, which means they're inching toward 25 percent of the engineering school.

A WHOLE NEW WORLD

If Schroeder is expecting his kids to take their engineering skills back to deal with village sanitation, he may be disappointed. Once his students have lived in a city and seen its opportunities, it's hard to sell a lot of them on returning home full time.

Peggy Paulus, from St. Paul, put it this way: ''Village lifestyle is OK if the ladder you want to climb in life is very short.''

Someone like Paulus could work for a village public works department and make maybe $13 an hour, she said. But that doesn't do much when utilities are $600 a month and gas is $2.50 a gallon. ''Your whole life is paycheck to paycheck. ''

Social life in a village is also very limited, Paulus said. You can't go to a movie or watch your children play soccer. There's space to roam, which is good for kids, but ''the winters do get a little long, '' she said. ''I love St. Paul. It's beautiful there. I have roots there. I just choose not to raise a family there.''

Paulus took a year off after high school, had a baby, then enrolled at UAA as a pre-med student. In her third semester, ''I poked myself with a needle, and I didn't like the fact that I could have contaminated myself so easily. I decided I didn't want to deal with disease and sickness every day of my life.''

She switched to architecture; Herb found her there.

''I've considered about 10 times this semester to change my degree to accounting or something, to get out of more math, '' she said. ''I have to think to myself, 'I'm this close to being done.' ''

When she is done, she'll be qualified for many jobs that don't exist in villages, and she will be valued by companies like Alyeska Pipeline, which has promised to get its Native employment up to 20 percent by 2004.

ANSEP's success rate makes it a good use of Alyeska resources, Wight said. According to the National Science Foundation, the average retention rate for Native Americans in engineering programs nationwide is 27 percent. ANSEP has already passed 70 percent, a feat Wight calls ''kind of unheard of.''

''It creates opportunity is what it amounts to, '' Wight said. ''Then through their own initiative and effort the students take advantage of the opportunity that was given to them.''

Schroeder continues to push ANSEP, working to expand it at UAA and to share it with other universities. Lazzell says it can be a model for creating a learning community in any discipline.

ANSEP at UAA is now part of a three-state Pacific Alliance, which recently got a $2.6 million five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to expand the program to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the University of Hawaii and the University of Washington. There's also a pilot project that sent computers to Kotzebue high school juniors, along with an ANSEP student to help put them together. The idea is that next year ANSEP won't have to send anyone because this year's beneficiaries will be seniors and can mentor the new juniors.

One unanswered question is, what happens to ANSEP when Schroeder finally runs out of steam? He's got that covered, too. By then one of his kids will be an engineering professor and ready to take over, he said.

''Eventually the students will provide the driving energy to keep the thing rolling.''

Reporter Sheila Toomey can be reached at stoomey@adn.com or 257-4341.

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