HVAC was never intended to be my career.
Just after high school I was determined to work with animals, so I started working as a veterinary tech while I debated going to school for veterinary medicine.
I came to Evansville because I thought the Mesker Park Zoo would be an amazing place to work and get some experience in the field. Little did I know that the Mesker Park Zoo had incredibly high standards, and many of their techs were already vet students. Since I had no experience yet, the only job they had for me was cleaning up animal poop. This was not why I had moved to Evansville! I couldn’t afford to quit the job, but I did get motivated to start taking night classes at the Evansville community college program in HVAC repair. The area around Evansville had been experiencing a lot of growth in the last few years, and I read an article online about how local contractors needed more HVAC specialists. Because I already had several college classes under my belt, I adapted very easily to the HVAC program. Within a few weeks I had used my local contacts to secure a part-time job with an Evansaville contractor, so I could start getting some field experience. In a little bit of irony, one of the first HVAC repair jobs I went on was to one of the animal enclosures at the Evansville Mesker Park Zoo! If anything, that day confirmed that I had made the right choice, and that my future in Evansville was in HVAC work.