On May 26-28th, 2017 I went on a BOCES trip to Syracuse. This trip was to the State competition for BOCES elective trades. Out of many students I was chosen to go, only a few kids from each class are eligible to go, so spots fill quick. Each class had a few different genres of competition to choose from. The competition I was going to do was Teamworks. This involves four kids in total but from two different classes. From my class, HVAC/R it was Brock Neahr and I. From the Construction Trades class was a kid named Dan and another named Chase.

The first day of the trip we had to be at BOCES before 10:00am to get our luggage loaded and packed on the Coach bus. Our next stop was the hotel in Syracuse called Crowne Plaza on Genesee Road. The hotel was nice — I liked it, it was pretty awesome. As soon as we got to the hotel we had a meeting and got our keys to our room. Almost everyone had a roommate. My roommate was a kid from the morning class that I’m in at BOCES, Kody Brockway.

After we unpacked and got settled, we had dinner at 6:00pm sharp. After dinner we had a meeting at the New York State Fair Grounds. It was the opening ceremony. After that we had to head to our competition site. There we met the chairmen and had to take two tests, one individual, the other as a team. We were handed schematics which were the plans and tasks we must accomplish. We went back to the hotel to rest up for the next day since breakfast was 6:00am sharp. They said they’d be knocking at 5:00am… luckily they were kidding.

On competition day I really really didn’t wanna wake up. They had a buffet with scrambled eggs, fruit, sausage, and home fries. I got the eggs, sausage, fruit and I grabbed a yogurt. After we were all done eating, we met on the bus. As we got to the competition we had to get off the bus and go to the tool van and grab our tool boxes. When we got to our competition site we started putting on our tool belts on and grabbing what we would need: hammer, wire stripper, screwdriver, measuring tape and of course, safety equipment. Safety was most important — we needed to treat it as a real job site, so we made sure to have proper clothing, safety glasses and a hard hat. At this point our teammates showed up and along with some other teams. The judges started showing up and the chairmen began to give us directions. After he was done talking we had to go get all the supplies, wood, and nails.

Our first task was building the main wall. At first things started out slow. There was arguing over something that wasted our time. One of our teammates was insisting we cut ¾ of an inch off an 8 foot wall stud made for an 8 foot wall to make up for the plate on the bottom and the double plate at the top. But we never ended up cutting them which was the right thing to do, but we also forgot the two top plates which are just smaller boards nailed on top of the bigger board. We definitely lost points for that. But we also need two wing walls off the main wall. One was a door wall and the other a window wall — don’t forget, this is all framing just wood-nailed together. Our teammates took a little longer than expected to get the window wall up.  This pushed back my time on finishing my electrical work.

In the meantime though Brock and I did part of our tasks as they did theirs. My task was all the electrical and Brock’s  was the plumbing. He went under the platform that was provided for us where the main wall was nailed. Brock did a phenomenal job with the plumbing. Everything was correct, except the pitch was a little more than needed. The pitch of the PVC pipe is important to ensure that solids and liquids move together without any back-ups or clogging.

For the electrical I had to wire up two outlet boxes, one switch box, light box and a fan box. As I was waiting for the other two kids to put up the two wing walls I did the electrical work I could. I started with the two outlets, one was a GFI, which was a safety switch in the outlet itself to cut all power to that outlet if any water was exposed to it. These are usually found by any water source in a household. After nailing up those two boxes, I grabbed my 3 wire, which consists of a black (hot), red (hot), white (neutral) and the bare ground wire, and started running my wires. After those were done, I proceeded on my light fixture and my fan box. The last thing was the switch box on the door wing wall which wasn’t up yet. The switch box was wired to the fan and light fixture. This pushed back my work since I had to wait for the other kids to be done. Then we ran into a problem: the time. We had an hour left and had so much still to do. I started helping one kid with the final wall so I could finish my electric, as Brock and the other kid started the masonry. The masonry was a six layer brick wall along our platform. Just before the five minute mark, we finished the rest of my electrical and started to clean up the work area.

Since it’s my junior year and first year at BOCES, I was honored to get this experience. I looked forward to it and did as much practice as I thought I needed. Also, this allows me to participate next year as a contestant. Although it was a great experience, I feel like we could have done a lot better. Most of our work was done, but not completely correctly. We definitely needed more communication and agreement. But it was an awesome experience and I can’t explain.  I’m very excited for next year when I plan on enrolling in the same TeamWorks competition. Hopefully I will lead and help my teammates to place and to advance to Nationals in Kentucky. These are my hopes and goals,after my SkillsUSA experience of 2017.