I got into Heating and Air Conditioning work quite by accident.
- I was a student at the college, residing in a dorm while I studied mechanical engineering.
I didn’t entirely love what I was doing, and found the subject interesting but just not holding our attention. My grades were slipping. It was around this time that the dorm started experiencing some problems with the climate control system, each of the dorm rooms had its own small Heating and Air Conditioning unit mounted in the window, but they were all over 20 years old, and starting to fail on a yearly basis. When the AC in our room broke, I took the unit out the window and cracked it open to look inside. With our mechanical engineering background, I thought I could at least suss out the issue with the air conditioning. I was wrong, and our skills with engineering didn’t help me at all inside this air conditioning. I ended up making the concern worse, but thankfully the systems ended up being updated some weeks later. When the Heating and Air Conditioning techs arrived for the new systems, I followed one of them around and watched him work. I asked a lot of questions about the basics of how Heating and Air Conditioning systems operated, and later asked him if the job paid well. She wouldn’t tell me how much she made, but said that with no college debt she was able to start saving money from her Heating and Air Conditioning job after her first paycheck. As someone who was abruptly falling into college debt, that was when I got entirely interested in becoming an Heating and Air Conditioning tech.