Transcript: Dr. Adrian Isles

I am blackness
Episode “Dr. Adrian Isles”

Carlita Lindsey: Hi, I am Carlita Lindsey and welcome to I am blackness, the only show that highlights the rich variety of who we are. What we are up to, and how we define ourselves. In today’s show we are going to meet Dr. Adrian Isles. Adrian is a proud graduate of Howard University and received his PHD in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkley. Some of his answers on how he got to where he is may just surprise you. Check it out.
Dr. Adrian Isles: I feel like I am standing on the shoulders of giants. I am where I am because if the things that I have achieved. But I am also I am who I am because of all the people who came before me.
When I went there, I started in 1988, it was just a wonderful experience because it was the first time where I would go someplace and there was all these black people, and they would actually got props for being smart. So like in high school I was just kind of, you know, this I wasn’t the nerdiest kid or whatever, but I wasn’t like the football player.
But at Howard there was actually you know, currency that you got, form other black people, women in particular. That was wonderful, you knot the professors were smart. You just had all these black people that were just doing all these positive things.
I went to UC Berkley; I went there form 93 to 2000. I must say it was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my entire life. And part of the struggle with it is not just that the work is hard per say. It wasn’t that oh look I am spending like 18 hours in the lab everyday. It was just that the task is a daunting one. Your coming there you take your classes’ fine. But at the end of the day you have to contribute something new and fresh and technically significant to the field of electrical engineering. And that’s hard.
There are two things that I learned from getting my PHD, above and beyond the actual technical details of what I learned. Because that becomes obsolete after time. One is to go about how to think about problems. And that is something that still today is very, very useful. I solve new problems now that I did before. But the approach that I sue is the same. The second thing is most the important, is perseverance in life. Just hanging in there is so important in life sometimes. You’re not always going to see the light at the end of the tunnel. You just have to keep on getting up every morning, going to work, doing what you’re doing. And eventually good tings happen.
So my area is called electronic design automation. The purpose of this area is t come up with software that helps electrical engineers designing hardware. Like the Pentium chip, or the hardware in your cell phone, or the hardware in your digital camera.
When I was twelve my father bought me a commodore 64 computer, most people today probably don’t know what these are, but it was this computer that came out in the early 80’s. I think 82. It didn’t have a monitor you had to hook it up to your television. It didn’t have a hard drive; it didn’t even have a floppy drive. You had a little tape, a little cassette tape that held all the data on it that you would load up and you would be able to write programs. He gave me this as a birthday present, and I actually started hacking on it, and coding on it. And from that experience from him giving me that, I just fell in love with computer programming. Yeah.
I think the people who are most successful doing electrical engineering actually just like to do it. They just naturally like to do it. Growing up my parents taught me that I can do anything that I wanted to do, if I set my mind to it. That is not entirely true. I think there are some areas that certain talents that we have given to us by god. That allow us to excel in ways that other people cant. And it is very important to find out what that talent is. When you find out that talent is, and then you can go for the starts.
I order to improve your life, it is going to take a lot of hard work, and it is going to take academic achievement. And really that is the only way to make it in America. Unless of course you are one of, I don’t know how many NBA athletes are there playing right now? A couple of hundred, maybe if you are a couple of hundred than your good to go, but other than that there is no was else to make it except through hard work and education. Education is the great equalizer in this country.
My grandparents didn’t have college degrees, and they didn’t make it far. I don’t know if my grandmother even graduated form high school. I don’t think that she did that. But they always had a sense that education was important. And that notion was passed on to my parents, who both are, you know… My mom is Dr. Isles, my dad is Dr. Isles, and my sister is Dr. Isles. Everybody is Dr. Isles. If they call the phone at the house, is Dr. Isles there, well who do you want?
Also there is a spiritual level as well, or just a belief in god. That I think is very important, particularly dealing with those moments of adversity, when you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, its nice to know that you should fear no evil, because somebody is watching over you, and that’s really, really important. That’s really, really important, because life is hard and you always going to have adversity and your always going to have to have somebody y7ou can go to. Some god, some spiritual component you can go to, to help you deal with that.