Oil Refinery Management, Amtrak and Graduate School

One is a former chef who soon, as a mechanical engineer, will be overseeing maintenance at the East Coast's largest crude oil refinering complex.

A second is an electrical engineer who, thanks to the College of Engineering's Accelerated Bachelor/Master Degree program, will earn both degrees in just five years.

Another is a civil engineer who—after delivering the student address at this month's college graduation—will soon be employed in an Amtrak management training program.

These are the options being pursued by just three of the outstanding class of 132 engineering graduates who this spring received their BS degrees.

Boris Borovikov, who emigrated with his family from Russia to Philadelphia in 1992, spent five years as a culinary school-trained chef before he decided to follow in the footsteps of one of his grandfathers, a Russian telecommunications engineer. (I am a mechanical engineer, my grandfather was a telecommunications engineer. Not quite sure it's following in his footsteps.)

"After being out of school for eight years, I had to work pretty hard," says the Bensalem (Pennsylvania) High School graduate. "I learned that you sometimes have to struggle to get to where you want to go." (said that about going back to school not about my time spent before that) Borovikov was part of a Temple student team that designed a research experiment to collect atmospheric samples in order to test for greenhouse gas data via a suborbital rocket launched in Virginia as part of NASA's RockSat-C Program.

Borovikov also was part of a team of students that built a one-quarter scale open-wheel formula style race car as part of the Formula SAE competition organized by SAE International. "I was competing against graduates from all over the country," he says of his new job as a maintenance project manager at Philadelphia Energy Solutions' South Philadelphia refineries, "but I wasn't intimidated, because not a lot of people get to do the kind of activities that Temple offered."

As part of the four-in-one program, Tori Slack, of Phillipsburg, New Jersey, began taking graduate-level courses the spring of her junior year—and will graduate again next May with a master's degree in electrical engineering instead of two years from now had she pursued a traditional master's degree.

"It's great," says Slack, a former president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Temple student chapter who wants to pursue a career in controls and power systems engineering. "You spend less money on graduate school and get the same amount of knowledge."

Ever since Skylar Leach's father set up an electric train set in their Brooklyn house when Skylar was two years old, the construction management technology graduate wanted to work with trains. Now he is, with Amtrak's management associate program.

The graduation speaker received the Theodore P. Vassallo Award, among other endeavors: serving as chapter president and events coordinator of the Temple student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), co-president of the Student Professional Engineering Council and co-chair of the National Society of Black Engineers' pre-college initiative, which encouraged North Philadelphia high school students to pursue STEM majors in college.

His networking at an ASCE forum for young engineers led to the first of his two summer internships with Amtrak and, ultimately, his new position. "I love trains and even in high school I wanted to work in rail," says the Willingboro, New Jersey resident. "To actually be doing it for my career, it's like something out of a movie."

Story by Bruce E. Beans