Michele Yatchmeneff traveled from Anchorage to Arizona State University. Matt Calhoun went to college on the East coast at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut.
Neither would get their undergraduate degrees from those schools. Because there, they both said, they didn't feel like they fit in. As Alaska Native students, they made up a very slim minority. They left and returned to Alaska, but that wasn't the end of their educational careers.
Yatchmeneff and Calhoun enrolled at the University of Alaska Anchorage, joined the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program, and after years of schooling and earning their Ph.D.s, the two 35-year-olds started at UAA this fall as the university's first Alaska Native tenure-track engineering faculty members.
"To reach this milestone, it's inspiring for everyone," said Michael Bourdukofsky, chief operations officer of ANSEP, a program that aims to get more Alaska Native students interested in science, technology, engineering and math, so they can pursue degrees -- and eventually jobs -- in those fields.
Herb Schroeder, who founded ANSEP, said Yatchmeneff and Calhoun understand "the importance of Alaska Natives having bachelor's degrees in science and engineering, so they can have a seat at the table when people are making decisions about the land they've lived on for 10,000 years."
"I knew they could do it," he said.
Schroeder started ANSEP in 1995 as a scholarship program. He said that while researching rural sanitation in villages across the state, he noticed major communication problems between Alaska Native residents and engineers.
"Neither group understood the other," he said. He concluded that, "We could dramatically improve the situation by having Native engineers. So I said, 'I'm a professor, I'll make a Native engineer.' "
To do that, he faced a long-standing achievement gap between Alaska Native students and their white peers. In 2013, Alaska Native and American Indian students in grades seven through 12 dropped out of school at a rate more than double that of white students, according to data from the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development. That same year, 13 percent of the state's Native fourth-graders scored proficient in math, compared to 52 percent of white students, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Also widening the gap were high teacher turnover rates that plague rural school districts. Schroeder said he noticed that some rural students did not have the socialization and academic skills to thrive at a university. What they needed, he said, was support.
Schroeder said that when ANSEP began "there was a general belief that Native people weren't capable of earning science and engineering degrees."
"We've certainly disproved that in a big, big way because our kids are some of the best kids in the nation and they're from villages," he said.
Since 1995, ANSEP has grown from one university student to more than 1,500 students that stretch from sixth grade all the way to those pursuing their doctoral degrees.
It has numerous industry partners and holds various programs, including two-week summer academies at UAA for middle school students. At the university level, the program's students attend weekly team-building meetings and study groups. They are co-enrolled in math and science classes, so they always have at least one ANSEP student to study with. Students must complete summer internships. They also have mentoring and scholarship opportunities available through the program.
Each component of ANSEP, from middle school to the graduate level, Schroeder said, is crafted around the concept of working together as a community. On UAA's campus, ANSEP is housed in a 14,000-square-foot building where students can meet. The program gets money from the state and federal government, the UA system, corporate sponsors and foundations.
Since 1995, more than 300 Alaska Native scientists and engineers have graduated from UA, ANSEP reported. The Urban Institute, based in Washington, D.C., published an external review on ANSEP in early 2015. It reported that 77 percent of students in the Middle School Academy successfully completed Algebra 1 at their home schools by the end of eighth grade. It said 79 percent of high school students in the ANSEP Acceleration Academy who took pre-college or college-level math courses completed the classes with a grade of C or higher.
In 2008, ANSEP started "Grow Your Own Ph.D." and "Graduate Success" programs to provide financial support for Native students to get their degrees in STEM fields, Schroeder said. He said it was partly an effort to address the lack of minority faculty members on campus.
"It's a chronic problem," he said.
Yatchmeneff and Calhoun were the first to get doctorates through those programs and return to UAA as faculty members.
Yatchmeneff is Aleut and grew up between King Cove, False Pass and Anchorage. She graduated from Bartlett High School in Anchorage.
"I'm kind of what you would call a migrant student," she said. "I used to go back home for commercial and subsistence fishing and then I had schooling all in Anchorage."
After Yatchmeneff returned to Alaska from Arizona, she started attending classes at UAA and joined ANSEP.
"I was like, 'I'm going to give this engineering thing one more shot and see if I still like it,' " she said. "It was the best semester ever after that. You know, I got a 4.0 (GPA). And I thought, 'Yes, I think engineering is the way.' "
Calhoun, who is Athabascan and from Homer, said he moved to Anchorage at age 16 and graduated from Dimond High School. After leaving Connecticut, he spent the summer commercial fishing. It was a bad season, he said. He decided to look at his options and took a trip to UAA. By chance, he said, he met Schroeder, "and he told me about ANSEP. I couldn't believe I hadn't heard about the program."
Schroeder set him up in housing with other ANSEP students, Calhoun said. "We had recitation sessions together and (we were) provided scholarship support and it was all of these things that I needed to be able to go to school and those people who I studied with back then have become my lifelong friends."
Yatchmeneff earned her bachelor's and master's degrees at UAA before she started working in Alaska's construction and engineering industry, specializing in water and sewer projects in remote villages. In 2007, she returned to ANSEP as a deputy director. This year, she earned her Ph.D. in engineering education from Purdue University in Indiana.
Calhoun graduated with his bachelor's degree in engineering in 2002, worked as a project engineer for three years and returned to ANSEP as a regional director. He earned his master's degree in civil engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder and later his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
This fall, both are teaching classes and will continue to work at ANSEP and serve as mentors, they said.
As mentors to ANSEP students, Yatchmeneff said, "We want to let them know that they can have the best of both worlds. They can still have their Alaska Native culture respected and honored here, but also their future endeavors, in becoming scientists and engineers honored as well."
For Yatchmeneff, she said ANSEP is "mainly about belonging." For his part, Calhoun was candid when asked if he would have gotten his Ph.D. without ANSEP.
"Oh, absolutely not," he said. "I wasn't even going to go back to undergraduate after dropping out my first year."