>> With my degree I entered the Navy as a Naval Officer.
I got commissioned here at Villanova, and was in the active duty for six years.
I was on a ship for three years and then up in Newport, Rhode Island for three years,
and it was after the completion of those six years and started looking for a place to work
and using some of the military headhunters that I landed at my current employer Air Products
and Chemicals, which has a longstanding history of employment for Villanovans that are
in the Engineering School, mostly mechanical and chemical engineers.
I probably gained more, or as much, from my military experience as I did
with my Villanova education; I think they really go hand in hand.
You know with the Villanova Engineering Degree, I learned the fundamentals
of you know fluid flow and heat transfer,
and you know at that point I still wasn't sure whether or not I wanted
to be involved in hardcore engineering.
I didn't grow up taking apart the family television or the radio
or the you know the bicycle to know whether or not I really wanted to be a hands-on engineer,
and so I used my degree and then my military experience where I was involved with engineering
and operations to determine at that point in my life that even a company
like Air Products was a good place to work
because they have a really solid rotational program that allows you to work in a couple
of different jobs for short periods of time and kind of narrow down your focus as to
where you want to take your career.
And it was at that point, and in that experience that I realized that I wanted
to use my technical degree but more in a business capacity, which was what I've done
in most of my Air Products career.