ALBANY, N.Y. — I am DeShawn Alexander, a student at Pennsylvania College of Technology located in Williamsport, Pa., and I am enrolled the Bachelor of Science HVAC/R undergraduate program. I recently read the July 2007 article entitled, “Letter to dean of college construction program,” which I found very interesting and informative.

Maybe one day CONTRACTOR magazine can do a article on my school HVAC/R program, which houses one of only two HVAC/R Bachelor’s degrees in the country. It just seems like we are overlooked somehow by the industry, but when people hire our graduates or talk to us, they are astonished by how much we can already understand and do when it comes to work.

I am currently a intern at Lewis Engineering, a building systems engineering firm, where I beat out top engineering school students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Rochester Institute of Technology because the people at the firm were not only impressed that I knew industry terms, but that I could do load calculations, duct sizing, pipe sizing, and drafting, which they told me can take a top student from a engineering program two years to learn.

DESHAWN ALEXANDER
Intern
Lewis Engineering P.C.