Meet Booz Allen Consultant and FIRST Volunteer Dwayne K. Johnson

Title: Associate

Joined Booz Allen: 1994 to 1998; rejoined the firm in 2005

What type of work do you do at Booz Allen Hamilton?

I’m a technical task order lead, and I use my background in engineering, technology, and communications to help our clients fulfill their project security goals with full lifecycle support for a 2,300-user Web-based application. Primarily, my team supports the intelligence community.

Tell us about the organization for which you volunteer and why you chose to support it.

It’s called FIRST: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. FIRST is comprised of four programs including the FIRST Lego League (FLL), for which I’ve volunteered as a judge for 5 years. FLL involves teams of middle school kids aged 7 through 14 in building a robot from a kit, using Legos for the structure and a robotic brain to program movement. In this way, the kids develop skills in science, math, technology, teamwork, and other disciplines. About a million students and 70,000 volunteers have participated in FIRST over the years. I support FIRST because professional athletes are always receiving accolades and I thought professionals who excel in technology should receive the same recognition, so kids would be attracted to that field and see what they could accomplish in it.

What type of volunteer services do you provide to the organization?

As a judge, I evaluate the programs, robot design, and how well the students work as a team, and resolve questions that come up during the competition. We assess the kids in primarily four areas: Technical, research, design, and competition. For example, one challenge was to build a cantilever in 10 minutes. It had to hold a weight and the students could use only a manila envelope with 10 sheets of paper inside. For that challenge, the students had questions such as whether they could use the metal fastener on the envelope to build the device. After they completed the task, we gauged them on how well the cantilever worked, but just as important was how well they distributed the responsibilities among all members of the team.

How has Booz Allen supported your volunteer commitment?

I got six of my Booz Allen colleagues to volunteer at the FIRST Maryland state championship, and supporters of FIRST in Central Maryland—Barbara Wertman, Wayne Fuller, Deon McGuire, and myself—and members of the local FIRST Robotics Competition team at Liberty High School met with vice president Jim Allen. As a result of that meeting and the involvement of staff members, the Central Maryland office is working on ways to provide greater support to FIRST. In addition, Booz Allen’s corporate office provides grants to new teams to help offset the costs of registration.

How are you able to leverage your skill set as a Booz Allen employee to assist this organization?

It can be daunting for first-timers to participate in the FLL competition because it demands technical aptitude and it can feel like the teams that you’re competing against know more than you. I use sensitivity and compassion to make sure the kids aren’t intimidated by the experience. It’s also important to have a sense of humor, with the kids and with my Booz Allen development team. I want to make sure they all have fun at what they’re doing. When addressing performance issues at work, I need strong people skills so I can help a member of my team resolve the issue and perform better. I need people skills for FIRST, too. If there are seven kids on a team and only three are answering questions as to why they used a certain wheel size and so forth, I talk to those who aren’t answering to draw them out and build their confidence.

Has your volunteer experience helped you with your professional development?

Volunteering with FIRST keeps me humble. When I see where I am now and remember where I started, I can identify with the kids at the competition and how anxious they sometimes feel. I can also see how much more I need to learn and I’m motivated to push myself further.

What have you learned about yourself as a result of your volunteer experience?

That I’m more of a kid than I thought I was. I even purchased a FIRST robotics kit so my son and I could build a robot together. I hope to start a FIRST team soon with my son and his friends, and my colleagues from Booz Allen may volunteer as coaches. I also would like to start a robotics camp with Booz Allen’s support. I think it’s important to introduce kids to a field that’s not typically 9-to-5 and where they can grow. But it’s also important to get more adults enthused about the potential of the next generation.

What is the primary message you’d like your Booz Allen colleagues to know about your volunteer commitment?

That Booz Allen is one of the few companies that support not only its employees’ desires for their own professional development, but also their interests in their community.

profile posted March 3, 2008