Lull Mengesha has been mistaken for other black men so often through the years that he’s coined a phrase for the phenomenon: the “Tyrone factor.”

It happened again just a few of weeks ago when a UW graduate-school professor approached Mengesha, an Ethiopian, and resumed a conversation he’d been having with the only other black student in the class, a Puerto Rican. The two look nothing alike.

Mengesha, 25, says he finds the occurrence comical. He figures it’s bound to happen with so few black students around.

Perhaps that’s also why Mengesha’s dreadlocks were the subject of much fascination from majority students — whites and Asians — during his undergraduate years (his dreadlocks have since been cut off). Or why campus petitioners hardly ever approach him. Or why he’d get pestered by cops while walking through Greek Row.

From his seat in the commons of Mary Gates Hall on a recent Tuesday afternoon, Mengesha, a UW economics major who now works at Boeing and attends graduate school at the UW, surveys the scene around him.

“There’s not one other black student in this entire hall. That’s just how it is here,” he said.

Mengesha is the author of a recent 76-page book about being black in college, called The Only Black Student.

While Mengesha wasn’t literally the only black student attending the UW, it often seemed like it. Of the 42,000 students enrolled at the UW this quarter, about 3 percent are black. And of the 5,000 incoming freshmen this quarter, 131 are black. He sometimes felt detached from the campus community.

Mengesha hopes the book allows majority students to understand some of the challenges minority students face on campus, along with some basic guidelines in etiquette: “At least know the person’s name before asking to feel their hair,” Mengesha said.

The Only Black Student is as much a social commentary as it is a road map for social and academic success drawn from an admittedly “bumpy” undergraduate ride at the UW.

The first eye-opener came after Mengesha placed into Math 098 — the equivalent of a high-school algebra class that doesn’t even count for credit. Imagine the impression that left on the ego of the high-performing inner-city kid from Rainier Beach High School.

“You may have been the man in high school,” Mengesha writes in his book. “But when it comes to doing well in the classroom, remember: This is college.”

Mengesha draws parallels between his soccer-playing days and feeling less prepared than his peers in the college classroom, even after beating the odds just to get there.

He recalls how the Rainier Beach soccer team was crushed time and time again by teams made up of slower, less aggressive players from private high schools and the suburbs. His team rarely ran set plays, and the ball hardly ever left his team’s side of the field. That posed a serious problem for Mengesha, a slender 5-foot-5-inch goalkeeper who, by his own estimation, gave up close to seven goals per game.

“The other teams were prepared, followed instructions and made good choices about how to be successful on the field,” he writes. “In the classroom, we must do the same.”

Some of those choices and lessons learned allowed Mengesha to land a job at Boeing as a functional analyst after graduation. He’s now working toward a master’s of science in information management. At the age of 25, he has already purchased his first home. Predictably, none of it came easy.

He was born in Sudan to Ethiopian parents who left their native country in 1983. His family immigrated to the United States as refugees when Mengesha was just 3 months old. They first arrived in Chicago, then moved to San Diego before ending up in Seattle. Until his senior year of high school, Mengesha’s family spent time in various lower-income communities — the South Park neighborhood comes to mind first.

“No one really goes there unless they have to,” Mengesha said.

He credits his parents for instilling in him the importance of education. His mother and father both attended San Diego State University as he was growing up. His mother now works as an accountant, while his father is back at school studying to become a nurse practitioner after previous stints as a cab driver, real-estate agent and stockbroker.

“My parents never questioned whether I was going to college,” Mengesha recalled. “It was always, ‘What college are you going to?’ That conversation happened early in life.”

But many of the students he encountered at Rainier Beach High had a vastly different perspective on the topic. Being outwardly smart wasn’t an option.

“It’s not like anyone’s going to beat you up because you use big words, but there’s that sense of isolation you can feel socially when you’re an outsider,” Mengesha said. “You just keep it to yourself.”

When he and two close friends arrived at the UW, they felt isolated again, Mengesha said. One of the biggest challenges was learning to work with majority students for the first time. It took a while before he found his niche at places like the Ethnic Cultural Center, where other minority students would gather.

By the end of his undergraduate years, Mengesha was mentoring four younger students that had many of the same questions and concerns that he did when first coming to college. So he began writing for them. Eventually, with some guidance, that writing would turn into The Only Black Student.

He tells readers not to let social commitments get in the way of good grades, to ask instructors to repeat their statements as a way of gaining confidence in speaking up in class and expanding social circles to include majority students.

“A lot of the navigation about college, it takes until your junior or senior year to understand. There’s no reason to go through that,” Mengesha said.

Jordan Dacres is a freshman who read the book and met Mengesha last summer. He says he’s already on a first-name basis with professors because of what he learned.

And the part about hair-touching? Absolutely true, says Dacres, the owner of a well-maintained mohawk.

“I would meet random people, and the first thing they say is, ‘Oh, can I touch your mohawk?’” Dacres said, grinning. “Or they would just come up behind me without even saying anything.”

The part that resonates the most with junior and Black Student Union President Janel Brown was coming to campus and having few people to identify with. Even after spending most of her childhood in Puyallup, it wasn’t easy being the only person of color in a 400-person lecture. Everything in Mengesha’s book “just hit home,” said Brown, who helped land Mengesha’s book at the University Book Store.

“It feels good when someone expresses your feelings in a book,” said another junior and Black Student Union member Solomon Robbins. “Before, we had protests; we had dialogues. But when it’s in a book, it really shows something.”

So far, at least 1,600 copies of The Only Black Student have been sold. The book is also under review at Barnes & Noble and a few larger book stores. Mengesha says a second edition is in the works that will offer readers a female perspective on the minority experience in college, and he is also finishing an audiobook, having recorded his own voice, to be available on iTunes.

Mengesha says the challenges discussed in his book aren’t limited to the UW. He travels to different universities, giving workshops on some of the same issues. Just last month, he visited the University of Chicago.

Most of the early returns on the book have been positive, Mengesha said. But some, in particular those commenting on a Seattle Times story about the book, wonder if Mengesha is just “crying racism.”

“It’s far from that: It’s about trying to get out of the victim mentality and be proactive in college,” Mengesha said. “I couldn’t care less about what somebody thinks about a book they haven’t read. The feedback that would bother me is if people had a chance to read the book and didn’t find value in it. I haven’t had that experience.”

Reach Webcast Manager Maks Goldenshteyn at lifestyles@dailyuw.com.