Darryl and Stephen met in 2018 while Darryl was Associate Director of the Minority Engineering Program at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and while Stephen was Assistant Research Scientist in the Engineering Education Transformations Institute at the University of Georgia.

Darryl and Stephen both attended a conference on diversity in engineering, called the Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity. (Picture above is from the same conference 1 year later in 2019.) The conference was in Crystal City, Virginia. It was the first year the conference was held and it was intended to bring people in staff support roles like Darryl with people in education research roles like Stephen.

On the last night of the conference we met at an awards ceremony where Darryl was getting honored as the next elected president of NAMEPA (National Association of Multicultural Engineering Program Advocates-- sorry for all the acronyms in the story!). Darryl says he had seen Stephen present at the conference before that, too.

The next day in the conference wrap up, Darryl and Stephen kept being introduced to each other by other mutual friends-- so both the conference and the fact that our mutual friends thought we should know each other felt a bit like fate. Stephen was hanging around to see if Darryl wanted to talk more, but he was very busy as president and Stephen went to go see his family in Maryland. Darryl invited Stephen to come back down for breakfast later that week and we had our first official date at a bad diner in Crystal City. I remember the conversation went deep-- we talked about how we grew up and our values over eggs with American cheese on them...

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