In the Jungle; Hallee Murphy

Welcome to In The Jungle, where we meet the gorillas of Pittsburgh State University. I'm your host, Howard Smith, and today we're joined by Halley Murphy. Halley, thanks for being here. Thank you. Hey, just to start off, tell us where you're from and what your major is. Okay. I'm from a small town called Newton, Kansas, and my major is automotive mechanical design. That's an interesting major. Are there very many females in that? No. In the entire automotive department, there's maybe about six of us out of about three hundred students. How's that feel? Sometimes it gets a little overwhelming. Most of the time I walk into class and all the guys think that I'm in the wrong classroom or I'm a graphics major, things like that. But they're pretty quick to learn that I'm where I'm supposed to be. That's cool. What caused you, or how did you get into this major? Well, my dad got me interested in dirt track racing whenever I was about seven or so. I spent a lot of time on the track learning how to work on the cars, a lot of fabrication, and then in high school, I was actually on my high school robotics team.

So a lot of the mentors are alumni from Pittsburgh State, and they're from the engineering department, but they knew about the automotive department and my interesting cars, so they got me into it. Wow. They talk about pit state? A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple of them who are on the SAE Formula One team and a lot of them who went through the engineering program. Now, I understand you're a mentor. Is that right? Yes. Okay. Can you tell me about being a mentor in the automotive program? So there's a program called the Automotive Mentorship Program, and basically if students are having issues in any of their automotive classes or any of their genetic classes, they can come to us and we'll try to do some tutoring for them. A lot of students come in for electrical, so we wind up doing a lot of looking through wiring diagrams and making sure everybody knows about amps and bolts and knowns. What would be the challenging courses you've taken? Well, the mechanical design portion of my degree is all engineering, so it's a lot of math.

I took calculus in high school and then I didn't have a hard math class for another two years. So trying to get back into doing really hard math has been a struggle, but getting through it and you've got to put your nose to the grindstone and get through it and learn. So it takes a lot of extra time? Yeah, there are some of them that do. Like Thermo, that's one of the thermodynamics is one of the really hard ones to try to understand because you have to think of how heat moves through pretty much any material, so it's difficult at times. Wow. Hey, I understand you work in the Dean's office. So a student worker, a student worker in the College of Technology Dean's office. So I get to answer phones and make sure the vehicles and stuff are all right and then I also give tours of the building.

That sounds interesting. How frequently do you give a tour? Maybe two, three times a month. It kind of goes in swings of busyness since school schedules and everything, so once it gets towards the end of a semester, especially in the springtime, there's a lot of tours. Tell me what you do on a typical tour. Typical tour, it's an hour long tour. We walk around the building. We explore the wood tech department and I try to point out a lot of the machinery. Then we go to the printing and design graphics laboratory and show them the screen printers and some of the sticker machines and stuff like that. Then we go to automotive and I show them the Baja Buggy and also all of the donated cars that we have and then we go into the diesel shop and do the same thing for diesel. Then we head off to, we have a virtual, heavy equipment virtual simulation lab. Yeah, that one's a mouthful.

Basically, we go there, we go to the plastics department, we go to construction, we go to the technology and engineering education lab, so there's a lot of legos in that lab. That one's a pretty fun one. Then we go to manufacturing and like I said, that takes about an hour to go through all of it. That would take a lot of time. That's a lot of, I mean, you're seeing a lot in that tour. Oh yeah. What kind of questions do they ask you? A lot of it is placement questions and questions about how the machines work and things like that and trying to go through a lot of it is, you know, trying to explain how everything in the building is pretty much donated by industry and industries in the building a lot. So you have a lot of interaction between industry people and the students and whenever that happens, your placement ratings go up. So we've got a pretty high placement rating for the college of technology. So that partnership with the stakeholders, I mean the employers, that's huge in the college of technology.

Oh yeah. And pretty much all of our teachers have came from these industries. So they have networking connections, things like that, along with the actual school itself having those connections. So we bring in a lot of industry people. Wow. And how frequently do you see industry people in there then? It kind of depends on, you know, when big conferences and advisory board meetings happen. But once a year we always have company days where I think this year there was just under 200 companies in the building just recruiting for degrees in our building. Right. Yeah. Wow. That does explain in that high placement rate. I know the college of technology on campus has an extremely high placement rate and it's, it sounds like it's because of the training, it sounds like you're getting a good training program. Oh yeah. So you get experience, most of the time you are in a lab, it's a building of lab classes. So you get that hands-on experience with the machinery and, you know, with industry and some companies.

And so with that you get the experience and you're the foot up you need to get in the door. Well, hey, has there been any surprises about coming to school here and being in the automotive tech program? Um, I honestly didn't think that we'd have this many opportunities. Really? Yeah. I came in thinking, okay, I could go dealership work and, you know, being a small town in Kansas, I probably couldn't get to an actual corporation type of job without a lot of work. And I've done two internships with GM and one internship with Toyota and both of those I was in Michigan and California. So there's a lot of opportunities as long as you put yourself out there. Well, you're getting the background you need then and that's why you're going to get a job right away. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Everybody we're looking at Pitt State, a potential student, what would you say to them about why they ought to consider Pitt State or why they ought to come to school here? Well, honestly, the experience is that you have here and also as long as you work hard and you put in the effort, you're more than likely going to wind up farther than where

you think you're going to start off. Hey, that proves why you belong at Pittsburgh State University. Thank you for joining us for In The Jungle, I'm your host Howard Smith. I'm your host Howard Smith.