The Brain Drain is Reversible

This is an oped for Searchlight

BY Maggie Werner-Washburne

I confess: I am partly responsible for New Mexico’s brain drain. So are many of my colleagues at the University of New Mexico and other New Mexico schools.

Over the years, we worked to encourage and help our undergraduates and graduate students (in my case, STEM, or science, tech, engineering, and math students) pursue education and maximize their career opportunities, often outside the state. The better job we did, the more often they left for advanced education and jobs.

And because we thought our work was done, we neglected to take the next step: bring them back home.

Last year, I saw the problem clearly: I had mentored and trained over 500 young and talented students, many who had left New Mexico for famous schools, where they got advanced degrees and jobs. Many of them wanted to come back to New Mexico but there were barriers to their connecting with the companies that needed them. These young professionals know and love New Mexico. They are hightly educated and networked and are exactly the workforce needed to build the economic future for any company.

So I did what comes naturally to me as a scientist. I conducted an experiment: a three-day event now called STEM Boomerang (previously NM Educated Workforce in STEM), and scheduled it for the 2017 Christmas season, when many STEM professionals had plans to be in NM with family. We attracted 115 professionals – 60 percent of them with PhDs – and linked them with economic leaders and representatives of 30 local companies and national labs. The event was very successful and we continue to help participants with career connections.

The next STEM Boomerang will take place Dec. 20 www.stemboomerang.org.

But there are still major challenges to and opportunities for making great career connections, including:

The wrong expectations. New Mexico needs entrepreneurs and visionaries, so “Keeping them here” is not a universal model for innovation. Young people are not products and the educational process should not be a pipeline that treats them as passive objects. Our students have the potential to be explorers and creative thinkers. My work as a teacher and mentor is to help young people get to the top of their life’s mountain. Building a career in New Mexico should be a positive, attractive choice. There are compelling reasons to be here. If coming back or staying is their choice, we will have happy, more creative professionals, dedicated to building our state and our economy, and building a better future. New Mexico should be a destination, not a prison.
Too many job boards that are difficult to find and hard to navigate. New Mexico needs to understand who our competition is and it’s not here. We need to make it easier for professionals to find us, see how we collaborate, and our critical mass of talent.A search for a potential STEM professional career currently takes a long time, lacks a unified message, and, typically, does not include the startups and small biotech and tech companies where exciting careers often begin. We need a one-stop-shop, including information about the hiring process, which can vary greatly between national laboratories, schools and businesses. We have to imagine what it is like for the job seeker.

Forgetting that personal interactions are key. Millennials – like boomers – trust personal connections to develop their career paths. Introductions are important. Sadly, we found that many programs, faculty, and others didn’t make sure they kept in touch with former students and mentees, so when they would be ready for careers, we couldn’t reach them. The most valuable product of the program I ran, in addition to the jobs and well-trained students, was my database and other contacts for more than 500 young professionals.
Infrastrucuture challenges. The fun part was getting businesses to the table, but this took tremendous personal effort. I spent days talking to business groups, calling businesses, talking to HR representatives and CEOs, getting them to fill out a business survey that became our job board. Business people were the bright spots in this process. I was helped especially by Nyika Allen, Lisa Kuuttila, and Greg Byrnes, economic development professionals in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. We need businesss to sign on now for 2018.
New Mexico Publicity. We need a better business-publicity stream. A great idea in New Mexico should have a mechanism for every outlet to know about it and help publicize it, so it becomes common knowledge. This may exist, but I couldn’t find it. In a state like New Mexico, we need to embrace and publicize good ideas wherever they come from. For the state to succeed, we need to be a real team.

The first Boomerang was funded by UNM and my program and free to everyone else. I kept wondering why the idea didn’t go viral? Why wasn’t it mentioned at every business, professional, city council, and church group meeting – so people could encourage their children and friends to consider coming to this? How can we make good news travel faster in our state and to others.

STEM Boomerang focuses on a specific group of professionals – the people who know us, love our traditions, and can help us grow to keep New Mexico True! As we ramp-up for the next STEM Boomerang, we see some of the same challenges and new ones. Each of these is an opportunity for our state to do better, be more successful, and come to see that we are not each other’s competition – we can be the winning team.