Informational interview

In this informational interview I interviewed Hector Gamboa an engineer in the Corpus Christi area for some information. I interviewed Hector because his work environment is the type that I am looking for in my future. He informed me on what to except after I graduate from Texas A&M Kingsville with my bachelors degree, and on his real life working environment that an engineer uptakes after graduating. Also he informs me of his background, working conditions and skills he obtained too get his position.

BACKGROUND Hector Gamboa went to school in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated in four years with a Bachelors of Science and Chemical Engineering. At first he said he entered the University undecided of what he wanted to become, but he knew it was either going to be an Aerospace Engineer or a Chemical Engineer. Hector said it came to his conclusion that it was going to be a Chemical Engineer because he wanted to stay in an area of Corpus Christi. Another factor that caused him not to become an Aerospace Engineer was because he said as a chemical engineering there is so many places you can go with that degree and Aerospace was a lot me limited. After he graduated High School he worked at BMW Engineering where he learned AutoCAD. While attending the University he had two summer internships working a Sherman Aluminum a manufacturing complex and one summer working at Flint Hills. He informed me that the internships helped him a lot because he got to view the equipment he would work on in the future and gave him a more hands on experience with what the object did and how the functioned. He also said that in the Universities you are taught about these object and equipment but in a very basic matter so it’s not the same as when you are hands on with the job. In all his background experience he mentioned that what the University taught you were just the basics of what you actually have to be working with. Hector opened up my mind that I should probably be out looking for internships to get a more of a hand on type job and be in an actual working environment.

WORKING CONDITIONS Hector Gamboa is working as a Process Engineer at the Citgo refinery in Corpus Christi. He works a nine-eighty schedule and he gets every other Friday off which is ten to eleven hours everyday including lunch breaks. He spends about seventy-five percent of his time in his office and meeting and the other twenty-five percent on the field. He has a varied job with many different tasks, but he said most his day to day basis started off with the Process Engineers getting an assigned unit in the refinery. They first of all check the status of the unit over the weekend to make sure everything ran smoothly and to do updates. They also check the production of the units manifest like, if there is going be a change in the crude sled, if there is more sulfur in it, and is it going to get heavier and was it more viscous and all this varies because it tells them how fast it is going to move from place to place. They need to know at how much pressure to run it at and what temperature to put it at to make it run at a certain speed. They have flow meters that measure how many barrels come in fee and if it comes in a unit that produces product they have flow meters that measure the different products. They also have cokers that pull out the dense materials at the bottom of the crude atmospheric distillation towel and they send it through a process where they can bake it and force the molecules to split and they end up getting more fuels. Once they do that they take it to fractionators and what it does is it separates and distills the material into different cups and that’s where oils, kerosene, gasoline, diesel… and so on as the material gets lighter. They have flow