We did it!

I can't believe the time has finally come for me to say this, but I'm officially a journeyman electrician now! Our class graduated this past Saturday, June 5th, bringing 5 years of hard work and study to an exciting finish. The JATC did an amazing job of celebrating our successful completion of the program. We had a wonderful ceremony at Martin's Crosswinds in Greenbelt consisting of a formal graduation as well as dinner with family, friends, members of the JATC and several members of the electrical industry. Although the spotlight was on us apprentices and our graduation, I think everyone involved could see that the event was just another indication of how well organized and talented the people who run this apprenticeship really are: it was unforgettable.

So after five years of being an apprentice, I really look forward to working as a full-fledged journeyman. This past week at work has been very interesting for me. Nothing has changed to an outsider's perspective, but I feel compelled to work as fast and as diligently as possible and to make as many independent decisions as I can. I'm working under a terrific foreman who isn't putting any extra pressure on me because of my new electrical status, but I still feel like it's my job now to emulate the work I've watched countless mechanics around me perform for the past few years. The best journeymen I've worked with have all had one quality in common: regardless of their differing strengths as electricians, they've all brought a can-do attitude to the tasks they've been asked to perform. Although I still feel like there are plenty of things I don't fully understand in the electrical field, it is this quality with which I hope to approach my job every day.

A Different Feel

I'm really getting a new feel for what it's like being an electrician while I'm working on the job I'm currently on. We have had a very small crew--just a foreman, myself, a second-year apprentice and a helper--for the majority of the three months that I've been out there. Only recently have we added another fifth-year apprentice and occasionally a mechanic who helps us out when he's not busy doing service calls for the company.

With this set-up as it is, a lot of "important" work has fallen on my shoulders. What I mean by "important" work is work that ordinarily is automatically given to an experienced mechanic on the job--exposed pipe-runs that have to look just right, large runs with difficult routes, building electric closets, setting switchgear, etc. I have repeatedly been very surprised to realize that, most of the time, I am the most experienced electrician on the job outside of the foreman...and with graduation only two months away (!), I'm almost a mechanic.

It's really been a lot of fun. I feel great knowing that I'm being trusted to perform tasks which aren't 100% straight-forward and simple. To me, part of the experience of being an apprentice has been realizing that there's a lot I don't know and--as a result--holding a great deal of respect for the vast amount of knowledge that a mechanic has about electric work. I never really knew what sort of change to expect once the time came to become a mechanic myself. I guess I just imagined that I'd suddenly know a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't know before. As it turns out, as graduation draws closer, I'm understanding that a lot of the feeling of transition will come from the respect and trust that others put in me. This is a cool feeling; one which, by itself, is worth five years of hard work.

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!