Hvac Program

if you like to fix things, take things apart and see how they work, that would be the type of person that would work well here it's a really, really strong hands on field you have to be able to do things with your hands the program is a two-year associate degree program we do also offer a certificate and a diploma it's a very big field covers a wide spectrum of equipment in uh... systems and so we try to cover as much of that as we can. in the two year degree they would take all of it and the uh... diploma program it be primarily residential equipment we basically consider the second year more of the advanced skills another important aspect of the program is we do offer both day and night classes so that you could have a job and then go to school at night it gives the students that versatility that they might need to gain employment or keep employed we covering equipment cooling equipment refrigeration equipment duck systems ice machines. in the heating aspect we talk about forced air heating systems and hot water heating systems we also talk about heat pumps. the refrigeration is everything from your domestic home refrigerator you know all the way up to a system that you might see if the arsenal thats used in a manufacturing process and then everything in between the other thing would be alternative energy geothermals a really big thing right now and with geothermal we can heat or cool We're also getting into you know the solar aspect of it we're actually using a solar panel to generate the electricity to power an air conditioning system for a lot of companies that's cutting edge and that's what we try to do in the lab here we try to make sure that all of our equipment is as as close to new technology as possible because they need to be able to see that they need to see new technology and it's changing constantly is one of the best facilities in the state or in the Quad Cities, we have a sheet metal we have a residential facility, there's a lab in the center that does ice machines, chillers, high-efficiency boilers, geothermal equipment we have an electrial lab on the other side as well, our own computer lab our two classrooms and an inside storage facility there's a pretty large variety of jobs they can get into service technicians type of job where they're working strictly on uh... residential furnaces maybe like commercial heating systems and air conditioning systems than they might be doing service work or install work or a combination of the two we're also going to have people in sales we have students that go into design work so in words they're designing equipment for new buildings, new homes whatever along with that design work we have people that go into what we call the estimating field and of course you have a lot of people going into the maintenance field a lot of our students do go into maintenance at local hospitals, apartment complexes some of the local manufacturers our program has pretty much 100 percent placement it's an ever growing market because you know no matter what we have made outside this country we have to fix it here plenty of opportunities out there california or anywhere in the midwest or any place you want to go doesn't matter Florida's looking for people, Texaz all over, if you don't want to stay here that's fine, you'll do fine wherever you go we have partnerships with local industry they help us quite a bit. we have an advisory committee that consists of local contractors uh... and local wholesalers they've been very instrumental in and providing equipment and tools and things like that both to the program and to the students along with the the normal tuition cost that you have to pay to take any college course we have uh... a tool cost it runs about a thousand dollars for tools and the thing we always stress with tools when you go out of here that the employers are going to require you have your own set of tools so the tools aren't just purchased for the class they're purchased for your future you should have a fairly good mechanical skill set that when you come in the possibility there's good possibilities of making very good money in the field right now we're talking journeyman's scale around thirty dollars an hour if you go out and talk to people in the field you won't have a hard time finding somebody that's a graduate from the program