New Long Beach City College Trustee Uduak-Joe Ntuk sees a lot of the struggles he faced in the students he will soon be serving: he was once an LBCC student from a low-income home and also a teenage parent.

Now, the 39-year-old is an engineering professor at Cal State Long Beach and the Petroleum Administrator for the city of Los Angeles. On Tuesday, he will be sworn-in as the first African-American man to be elected to the board of trustees. He unseated four-term board member Jeff Kellogg in this year’s election.

“It’s interesting, in my capacity now, because I have been through what the majority of our students are experiencing,” Ntuk said. “Seventy percent of our students are low-income, many of our students are parents.”

“It was my pathway to education, my jump start,” he said.

Source:
Long Beach Post