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8 Black Celebrities with a STEM background

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Actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

The former WWE wrestler attended the University of Miami and graduated with a degree in physiology. After being passed over in the NFL draft due to a back injury, Johnson decided to pursue a career in wrestling.

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Comedienne and “The Real” Co-Host Loni Love

The talk-show host earned a degree in electrical engineering from Prairie View A&M University. “Growing up in Detroit, I worked at the automobile factory with engineers,” Love explained to Essence. She said she started doing stand-up to make extra money while in college. Love worked her way into an engineering project manager position before deciding to pursue a career in comedy.

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Former Talk Show Host Montel Williams

Williams earned a Bachelor of Science in engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. “My focus wasn’t as much in building things as it was a way of thinking and a paradigm for problem solving,” he told the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. “Engineering provides a strong math and science backbone, and also a framework for analysis. You learn to look at problems by breaking them into their component parts and then putting them back together in a sensible way.”

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Female Rap Artist Rah Digga
The lone female rapper of the Flipmode Squad graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “I was a wiz in physics and calculus,” Rah Digga explained in a 2010 interview with AllHipHop.com. “Math and science were my strongest subjects. It was the lyrical stuff that ended [up] making me pick up a career in it. Writing verses is almost mathematic for me.”

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R&B Diva Syleena Johnson

Twenty-one years after leaving college to pursue a career in music, Johnson returned to school and earned a degree in nutritional science from Kaplan University. “I got into nutrition when I met my husband, who at the time was a professional basketball player, and [I] was experiencing a yo-yo effect with my diet,” the R&B singer told Black Fitness Today. “So I met this dietitian who I fell in love with named Julie Burns…she introduced me to organics and the importance of proper nutrition and I just learned so much and lost a whole lot of weight.”

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Baltimore Ravens Football Star John Urschel

The Ravens’ offensive lineman earned his math degree from Pennsylvania State University, graduating with a 4.0 GPA. While playing in the NFL, Urschel also served as a math teacher at the university. The “mathlete” is currently pursuing a Ph.D in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Singer Songwriter Crystal Waters

The house music singer and daughter of famed jazz musician Junior Waters earned degrees in business and computer science from Howard University. Afterward, she pursued a career in music.

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American Actor, Director and Producer Nate Parker

This breakout actor graduated with honors from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in management science and information systems. Though Parker briefly worked as a computer programmer spending his days “in a cubicle writing code,” he ultimately decided to pursue acting after he was discovered at a modeling gig with his girlfriend.

 

 

 

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