When Dylan Lydic, a native of Jamestown, N.Y., arrived at Pitt-Bradford as a CIST student, he was already aware of the prestigious local oil refinery, the American Refining Group. What he didn’t know, but grew to learn, was the deeply intertwined relationship between Pitt-Bradford and ARG.
Dylan discovered the opportunity to intern at ARG when, while working at Walmart, he ran into Artie Geahr, the first professor he had at Pitt-Bradford. Artie gave Dylan information that landed him the internship, and now Artie, who is ARG’s network and systems administration manager, is Dylan’s supervisor at ARG.
When he learned about the internship, he was immediately interested.
"I wanted to do the internship because ARG just kind of has that prestige, and I thought, ‘Wow, I want to do my internship there because it just sounds so cool.”
He also already knew Geahr and Jeremy Callinan, ARG’s manager of information technology, because they have worked as adjunct professors at Pitt-Bradford.
Geahr said, “We have been fortunate to have a lot of Pitt connections,” which has led to several Pitt-Bradford graduates landing full-time jobs at ARG.
“The three staff members who are working closely with Dylan all went through the program at Pitt-Bradford, came here as interns, and stuck around and became full-time employees.”
Dylan, whose internship began in May, is currently working on streamlining ARG’s conference system, which has helped him soak up as much new and different information as possible.
So far, Dylan’s favorite part of his internship has been “using his brain. In most other jobs I’ve had, I’ve just been able to turn off my brain and coast through the day, but here, that is completely out of the question—you’ll either hurt yourself or break something. It’s exciting here because you’re doing something relatively new and different each day. Things don’t get too tedious or boring.”
Dylan said his internship at an oil refinery is similar to an internship at a hospital since both locations handle sensitive information that must be secured.
“There are systems that just cannot go down here, like units out on the refinery. We have uninterruptible power supplies (which allow systems to keep running when incoming power is interrupted) that need to be maintained in the same way that hospitals have HIPPA and machines that cannot go down.”
One big difference between interning at an oil refinery versus somewhere else is that “in the field of CIST, at most other places, you aren’t getting into a flame-retardant suit. Here, we are on our toes a bit more in that sense.”