Penn College News

Speaking from experience

Friday, March 12, 2021

Using square-foot floor tiles to maintain the space between them, students from the college's School of Engineering Technologies listen to Potts' on-the-job memories from construction of their immediate surroundings.Potts points out the three-dimensional structural details ...... while marking their location on building plans for simultaneous viewing on students' devices.Framed by two of the columns depicted on the drawings in his hand, civil engineering technology major Brandon J. Sensenich, of Lancaster, follows along via a Microsoft Teams hookup.Students in Drew R. Potts' Structural Steel Design class got a unique look at one of the academically advantageous areas in which Penn College has major bragging rights: the real-world credibility of its faculty members. Among his positions before joining the college family in 2008, Potts worked as an engineering manager and as a design engineer for a steel fabrication facility ... and among the projects on which he worked was the college's Student & Administrative Services Center, constructed in 2002 and dedicated the following February. The class convened Friday morning in the SASC lobby, where – distanced by necessity and connected by technology – they reviewed original architectural drawings and conveniently compared them to the full-size structure that rose from those blueprints. Among the life lessons imparted by Potts, an assistant professor and department head for civil engineering and surveying technology, is the need for communication given the frequent and substantial changes that occur between groundbreaking and ribbon-cutting.