Once in a Lifetime!

Yesterday, my time as an apprentice at Local 26 reached a height I never dreamed it would when I began training:

I had the tremendous privilege of meeting President Barack Obama!! You could have knocked me over with a feather.

The President visited our training facility yesterday morning before giving a speech discussing job creation and our nation's energy sources. He was given a tour of the hall by our directors and teachers, getting lessons on topics ranging from AutoCAD to PLC's. He was delighted to pull one of the fire alarm system display's pull stations: "I got a chance to pull the first fire alarm since I was in junior high and I didn't get in trouble for it!"

It is difficult to attempt to describe the honor that we feel as an organization at having been recognized and commended by President Obama and his administration. What an enormous testament to the hard work of the directors and staff of the JATC---it's their constant dedication to developing the apprenticeship program that led to this exciting day!

We were additionally thrilled to have had several other important members of the business and industrial communities with us. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, and IBEW President Ed Hill also came to share in the activities of the day.

I am immeasurably grateful to the JATC for having been given the chance to participate in this amazing event. It serves as a huge inspiration to me and I'll never forget it.

I can't say it enough: the opportunities provided by this apprenticeship program are endless. One minute, you're sweeping the floor at the jobsite. The next minute, you're shaking hands with the President of the United States!!

Back to it!

I just returned to work this past week after being gone for a few weeks. I traveled to Port-au-Prince after news of the earthquake to help out at a school I used to work at in the city. It was an interesting trip and I felt very useful--amid all the chaos, it felt great to be able to provide solid, professional support in the form of electric work. I mention this just to illustrate the utility that I find in being trained in this field. The work we do is helpful to people all over the world, and I was happy to explore new environments with my tools in hand.

Getting back to work on the job I'm currently working on has also been an experience. This week really drove home for me how much of a career being an electrician truly is. I believe it is a life-long experience, not something you learn how to do one time and then you've got it. After missing only three weeks of work at my job, I found myself fumbling to re-center my mind and focus on speedy and satisfactory completion of the tasks I was presented with. Let's just say that there are a couple pieces of pipe that I hope nobody notices sitting alongside of the dumpster!

I'm looking forward to a focused week ahead and getting fully back into the groove. Weather permitting!

New Year

So the new year finds me at a new contractor and in a very different situation than I was in with my old company! Such is the nature of the apprenticeship and honestly, it's one of my favorite parts about it.

At the beginning of December, I transferred to a new company for my final transfer. I decided to return to the first electrical company I ever worked for. The past couple of weeks have been a lot of fun and a lot of hard work: they've been fun for the simple reason that I've been lucky to work with a lot of people that I remember from my first year in the trade, and they've been hard because I have a lot more responsibility than I did during that first year!

For the last two and a half years, I've been on really large, new construction jobs, working alongside several other electricians--dozens at a time--apprentices and mechanics alike. Now, suddenly, I'm on a job with a foreman and two other apprentices. It's quite a change and probably a major cause of the increase in responsibility that I'm feeling. Nevertheless, I'm having a blast.

You wouldn't believe how fast a work-day goes by when you are personally responsible for getting projects done. Without having a mechanic by my side for the majority of my day, I have to make a lot of choices and decisions that were ordinarily not mine to make (how should this pipe be run, where should we mount a pull-box, etc.). I also have to set my own tempo, which is perhaps the strangest feeling of all--without realizing it, over the years I've grown very used to tailoring my work pace to that of my mechanic so that we work well together. I feel like I'm getting a glimpse of what life as a journeyman is going to be like: and that's a good thing, because it's only six months down the road!

Final Transfer?

A couple of weeks ago we were given our notices about the up-coming final transfer for 5th-years. Come December, if we choose to do so, we will be able to make our last transfer. Otherwise, we can just stay on with the companies we are currently with and continue working. Now is the time when we have to make that decision and get all the required signatures, etc.

I've been thinking about this transfer for a long time. To me, in terms of employment and the future, it represents the largest stroke of independent decision-making that I've had to make so far. I have to consider all the relationships I've forged in the past 4½ years as well as the different types of work I've encountered with each company, not to mention the availability of work that each company may or may not have at this point in time. I have to assess my opportunities.

But I also have to sell myself to a certain degree, or at least realize the fact that the day-to-day work that I've done since June 2005 has been my sales-pitch so far. This transfer has pushed me to evaluate myself more objectively: I'm comfortable with my skills as an apprentice, but do I make a good journeyman? I haven't had to consider this so honestly before. I've only got 7 or 8 months left as an apprentice. The company I choose to transfer to will be treating me like a journeyman in a matter of months. Whoa!

A Light Week

This past week on the job wasn't terrifically exciting but was plenty of work for me. I actually didn't have enough time to do everything I wanted to get done, even with 8 hours of overtime on Saturday!

My only task this week was to light up the elevator machine room. Simple enough--at first glance--but it has involved more work, thinking, and material than I originally anticipated. I spent the first few days of the week laying out and hanging racks to hang the lights from and the next couple of days hanging the lights themselves and starting to pipe them in. I feel like this entire project should have been completed by Friday afternoon, but here it is Monday morning and I've still got some work left to do! Also, I'm working with a mechanic who is an extraordinarily fast worker, and it's a challenge for me to keep up with him. One good thing I've noticed this week is this, however: when you're focused on getting a particular job done within a particular window of time, the days go by really quickly. It's 2:00 p.m. before you know it!

I noticed in particular this week that there always seems to be more than one way to do a job. I walked around that elevator machine room several times trying to come up with the perfect plan for how to lay out the lights, and then a perfect plan for how I was going to hang them. And I came up with what I thought was a pretty good plan. Sure enough, halfway through the week, my foreman came up to check on my progress and asked a lot of questions that began with the words, "Why don't you just..." It was frustrating to me that he was able to so quickly determine a faster and easier way to do my job, but once I got over that frustration, I was glad to see that there was more than one right way to do what I was doing. Hopefully, over time, I'll be able to more quickly figure out the quickest and easiest way to go about my work. As for this particular elevator machine room, however, you can expect to see carefully calculated light falling from the ceiling by the end of today, I expect!

More on the Solar Decathlon

At the risk of repeating myself, I want to take a last opportunity to encourage anyone and everyone to visit the Solar Decathlon this weekend on the Mall before it ends on Sunday, October 18th (http://www.solardecathlon.org/).

After two weeks of being back at my regular job, I still am (perhaps over-)impressed by the five days that our group from the JATC spent down there helping out. We brought along our personal tools, two carts full of power tools and a portable generator, and our knowledge from the field and did everything we could to get these teams up and running electrically so that they would be ready to be tied to the grid when the proper time came.

Due to the rush to get their houses completely built and functioning, the students were grateful for our help. As I said in my last post, we did a lot of work with grounding and bonding that was a little bit out of the ordinary. Since these houses were predominantly pre-built and then dismantled, only to be reconstructed once they arrived in Washington, most of the internal wiring was already complete by the time we showed up. That meant that the electrical panels were already wired and were pretty much sitting ready waiting for the meters from the utility.

The contest is special this year because the houses are all tied to the grid. At the last decathlon two years ago, when the JATC brought a class of third-year students down to help out for a day, a lot of the work that our apprentices did was helping out with the bank of batteries used for storage. Our experience was entirely different. Being tied to the grid means that no battery bank is necessary. One category of competition is seeing how much energy each house produces and is able to return to the utility, something that local utilities around the nation pay (or at least credit) private clients for doing. It is a very positive initiative.

As a result of being grid-tied, however, and due to the specifications set up by the contest organizers, each house was required to have a disconnect mounted to the exterior of the house before the feed enters the panel. This disconnect and its connecting raceways requires grounding, of course, and its existence upstream of the panel requires it to be the point of the main bonding-jumper. This was news to a whole lot of people! Understanding grounding and bonding, a very important safety and proper-functioning issue, is part of our course material in the apprenticeship and something you learn in your third year. And understanding the role of the main bonding-jumper and where it needs to be placed is at the heart of the subject!

We therefore had a big job of mounting disconnects and correcting a lot of the grounding systems that the students had installed. We re-pulled feeders and re-landed a lot of the equipment grounds in the house panels. This was all in addition to the work with the PV systems and solar arrays that we were lucky to get involved with!

Our experience made us realize how crucial the work of a knowledgeable electrician is to the developing field of alternative energy. The field is changing every day and is guided by the work of students like those at the competition who are designing practical, beautiful houses like those you can visit down on the Mall.

We met tons of these students who were enthusiastic about their projects and the future of solar and other alternative energies. Their positivity was contagious! Go down there and check it out before it's too late!

Something New!

AND......... just when I was getting a little bored doing the same old thing at work day-in and day-out, I'm slapped in the face with what has undoubtedly been the most exciting and interesting experience I've had so far as an apprentice.

I'm talking about the Solar Decathlon, which is currently taking place on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The Solar Decathlon is a competition between twenty teams from colleges and universities around the world to design and build the best and most energy-efficient house possible. It's called a "decathlon" because there are actually 10 different categories in which each team's house will be judged. For a full description of the competition, visit this website: http://www.solardecathlon.org/


I was very, very lucky to have been asked, along with five other apprentices from Local 26, to participate as a volunteer in this year's competition. So, from last Thursday through this Monday, the six of us and two of our instructors set out to lend a hand wherever we were needed on the Mall.


It's situations like these that make you realize what a valuable set of skills we learn as we become electricians. Once we made the teams aware that we were available to help, we were constantly busy getting their electrical installations up to snuff. Our group did a lot of work with grounding for the houses, tying in meters and panels, and, of course, installing solar panels! The teams were all extremely appreciative of our help, and we were equally (if not more-so!) appreciative of the opportunity to be involved. Personally, having worked predominantly on commercial installations throughout my time as an apprentice, I'd never had the chance to tie-in a meter on a house or even drive a ground rod. And I'd also never worked with any solar installations or any DC systems whatsoever. In the five days I spent on the Mall at the decathlon, I feel like I gained a year or two's worth of exposure. What a great time!


Anyone who's interested in electrical work, alternative energy, and the future of our field should take a couple of hours and tour the houses on the Mall once they open to the public on October 9th. I'll be there myself just to take a more complete look at the final products and to talk to the students about the amazing technologies and concepts they have incorporated into their designs.




I have plenty more to say about our time volunteering at the decathlon. Right now, I'm still processing it all! I send a hearty thank-you to the local and our JATC for getting our union involved in such a great project!