PTEC™ News

PTEC High School Club

Pittsburg High School, near Los Medanos College in California, has started a PTEC Club in order to inform students about careers in the petrochemical industries and the PTEC program at Los Medanos College. Approximately fifteen students are members of the club. Six of these students have enrolled in PTEC 901, an experimental, on-line, "bridge course" which informs students about careers in the petrochemical industry and provides skills in interviewing and company applicant testing. Three of the students in the PTEC Club are taking additional, higher level, PTEC courses. We are very excited about the interest that is developing for process technology at Pittsburg High and hope similar groups will be started at other area high schools. This effort was motivated by two Pittsburg High science and math teacher, Andy Kaiser and Phil Lucido. Both received their exposure to process technology through participation last year in two of our programs, the Summer PTEC Academy and the Summer PTEC Internship program. The PTEC Club and the Summer programs are great ways of exposing instructors and students to careers in the petrochemical industry.

posted on: March 1, 2010

Bismarck State College’s Process Technology Program featured in Ethanol Producer magazine

Bismarck State College was recently featured in the February, 2010 issue of Ethanol Producer Magazine in an article about colleges offering ethanol training.

Here are a few portions of the article:

In North Dakota, Bismarck State College has offered a Process Plant Technology program since the early 1980s, which has been expanded in recent years to provide biofuels-specific training. “We took our process program and tweaked it, added to it and modified it to include curriculum that focuses on ethanol and biofuels,” says Dan Schmidt, a program manager at BSC’s National Energy Center for Excellence. “The curriculum is designed to expose students to the equipment, the process flows and systems, safety issues and operator duties that an energy-level operator would be responsible for when they get hired at a plant.”

In addition to its two-year associate-level program, BSC began offering a four-year bachelor’s degree program in Energy Management in 2008. According to Schmidt, the bachelors program is an opportunity for graduates from a two-year technical program to expand their skills in order to qualify for a promotion into a management or supervisor role at their company. Because it is aimed at prospective students already in the workforce, the bachelor’s degree program is offered exclusively online.

Read the entire article here: http://www.ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=6184&q=bismarck&page=3.

For questions about BSC’s programs or hiring our graduates, please visit our website at www.bismarckstate.edu/energy or contact Dan Schmidt at Daniel.J.Schmidt@bsc.nodak.edu or 701.224.5735.

posted on: February 1, 2010