The Value of Education

By Timothy Allinson, P.E.

Murray Company, Long Beach, Calif.

Last month I received a call from two students seeking my help with an engineering project. They were involved in a national design competition through the Mechanical Contractors Association of America (MCAA) for the conversion of an existing 20-story structure into a residential high rise. The two students who contacted me had been given the task of designing the building's plumbing systems. I was happy to help them with their project.

I was pleased to learn that one of the best local universities has made plumbing design a priority in the classroom. It is a step in the right direction toward making plumbing a recognized and understood discipline in the engineering curriculum. At the time of this writing, we have just begun working on the project, so the details are yet to unfold, but the phone call couldn't have come at a better time.

As some of you may already know, I was supposed to attend the American Society of Plumbing Engineers (ASPE) convention in Tampa in October. I had submitted my name as a candidate for Vice President of Education (VPE) for the ASPE national board. Unfortunately, the untimely passing of my mother caused me to miss the convention; instead I traveled to New York to be with my father, brother and our spouses during this difficult time.

I maintained my VPE candidacy in absentia, but I did not win the election, although it was fairly close. Perhaps, if I had been able to attend, that would have made the difference: I will never know. I wanted to be the VPE in order to share what I have learned through engineering and teaching with as broad an audience as possible, but it seems that will have to wait.

Having lost the election, I volunteered my services to Bill Hughes, the successful VPE, for participation on the Education Committee, and he graciously accepted. So it seems that my intentions to be involved with ASPE on an educational level have not been in vain.

Although ASPE has not done much in terms of society-level organized educational programs in recent years (other than the convention and the technical symposium), I am confident that they will soon have a very good on-line educational program, courtesy of a valued member of the Education Committee named Scott Steindler. Scott has compiled a very comprehensive plumbing design curriculum, assembled from classes he has taken over the years, and I am eager to help him refine the coursework. When the curriculum becomes available, I urge you to become a member of ASPE. If you are not a member, then seek out the curriculum on the ASPE Web site and use it to your benefit. There are few places in the country where such a curriculum is available through any of the higher education institutions, so this coursework promises to be invaluable.

When I was fresh out of college, I knew a lot about engineering, yet little about plumbing and fire protection design. I was lucky to have available to me the NYU School of Continuing Education. There, I took classes in plumbing and fire protection design that proved to be of great help in my career. Years later I would go on to teach the very classes I once sat through, and the teaching experience proved to be even more valuable than the tutorial.

The point of these ramblings about my personal history is that education is of the utmost importance, at any age, at any time. If you have access to such classes, take them. If there are not classes available to you, see what you can do about creating them. Contact one of your local continuing education providers and find out whether they have plumbing and fire protection classes. If not, grab the bull by the horns and try to get the classes organized, even if you plan to be the student rather than the instructor. As quoted from one of my favorite films, Dangerous Liaisons, which I recently watched again, "Education is never wasted. Now, why don't we start with a few Latin terms ..." But I digress.

When I was fresh out of school, I interviewed with a brilliant engineer at Jaros Baum & Bolles named Robert Benazzi, who turned out to be my boss for 15 years. In the interview he asked me of what value I could be to the firm. I was thrown off base, and, after observing me fumbling for an answer, he shook his head and said, "College doesn't teach you what you need to know to be a valuable employee - it teaches you the thought process required to get there."

Twenty-two years later, those words still echo in my mind. The sad reality is that the absence of structured plumbing curricula in our Bachelor of Science institutions leaves a gaping hole in our industry - a hole left to be filled by the industry participants.

The inevitable cycle is that better design firms adequately educate their new entrants to the plumbing engineering discipline. If these employees stick around long enough, then once they have learned enough to become valuable, they are often snapped up by a competitor. I saw this many times in New York and continue to see it at my own firm in California. If plumbing design were taught as a collegiate level professional discipline, however, this on-the-job training followed by professional prostitution wouldn't occur - or perhaps it would occur less often.

Plumbing engineering is not a sexy industry. Few of us, as I have said before, grow up thinking, "I want to be a plumbing engineer!" It is a career choice that generally occurs because of a local need at the right time and place, not a choice that is specifically sought out by the potential candidate.

Albert Einstein has been credited as having said, "If I were to live my life again I would have been a plumber." This may or may not have been true - Albert Einstein is one of the most frequently misquoted men of recent history. But surely the famous quote of women throughout the ages holds true: "I should have married a plumber!" Oddly, the blue-collar, pillar-like strength of our industry has a certain allure, but it is still far from sexy.

So how do we make our industry sexier? The answer lies, I believe, in education -education of the individual and education of the general public about what it is we do. So often when people think of plumbing they think of their toilets and little more. The fact that plumbing includes the medical gas systems that their very lives depend on when having surgery would be an eye-opener for John Q. Public. Fire protection, pharmaceuticals, industrial and semiconductor industry systems are certainly not what the public thinks of with respect to plumbing, but these are the systems that many of us in the industry design on a regular basis, and that is pretty sexy. Plumbing and toilets? Not so sexy. Plumbing and computers? Much sexier.

So, the bottom line is that many in our industry require continued education in design, and that, hopefully, ASPE will be playing a critical role in that regard. Also, the public requires education as to what it is that we do. This will help in securing the professional reputation of the plumbing industry, and it will help lure new entrants, among them college graduates, into our industry. Hopefully, ASPE will play a role in that campaign sometime in the future as well.

I hope you all have a very enlightening and educational holiday. Use the time productively to catch up on your technical reading as time allows.

Timothy Allinson is a Senior Professional Engineer with Murray Company, Mechanical Contractors, in Long Beach, Calif. Prior to entering the design-build industry he worked for Popov Engineers, Inc. in Irvine, Calif, and JB&B in New York City. Tim holds a BSME from Tufts University and an MBA from New York University. He is a professional engineer licensed in both mechanical and fire protection engineering in various states, and is a leed Accredited Professional. Tim is a past-president of ASPE, both the New York and Orange County Chapters, and sits on the board of the Society of American Military Engineers, Orange County Post.