Star went on to get her engineering education at North Carolina State University. While there she started a co-op job with the US Army Corps of Engineers working with projects that mostly happened on the base. Once she graduated, she returned back to North Carolina and worked for the city of Rocky Mount where they designed utility lines, performed land assessments, and found ways to reduce utility bills for customers. In 1999, Star began working for the North Carolina Department of Energy where she has served for the last 22 years.
Today, Star is the state’s Energy Program Manager which consists of her providing technical assistance as well as programmatic and financial support for the programs in the energy sector. When I asked about the challenges she faced in building a network in an industry that is predominantly male and White, she simply said, “I’m one of the fortunate ones to have had Black leaders surrounding me.” Admittedly, she acknowledged the lack of diversity that was present whenever attending energy conferences on a national level. “If there were 300-500 people at the conference, then maybe you’d see 10-12 African Americans there. But I learned to navigate that. I felt secure because I had already saw African Americans in the energy field when I started.”