PE Qualifying Experience

[desnov74]

Hello everyone and happy holidays,

Most of my experience is in commissioning and start-up.HVAC, refrigeration, chillers, etc. I have a new position, and I'm being asked to help and move into commissioning of fire alarm, fire suppression, and smoke control systems. I have an Abet degree in electrical, and grad work in fire protection.

When applying for the P.E. exam, I know wording is very important in the application. What should emphasize in the application? Most of the calcs I did were trivial, however I reviewed many of the calculations.

If there are any Control PE guys and gals, or fellow fire people with PE's please let me know your opinions.

Thanks much.

 

[JamesBarlow]

The best advice I ever got on this was to remember that the board members, who will be reveiwing your application, are engineers. It's not necessary to say you performed calculations or made drawings since they already know what engineers do.

My application was pretty straight forward. I started doing small improvement projects on existing machines and eventually progressed to doing entire machines and supervising a staff. I didn't need to explain what it meant to design a machine, I only discussed things such as size, cost, and level of responsibility since the detail of my day to day activities was assumed from just being an engineer.

 

[JStephen]

Read through your rules carefully, for one thing.

There's a possibility that you don't meet the experience requirements, but there's not a good way to find out for sure without applying.

It seems to me that if the job being done requires a PE to do it, then that experience should also qualify one for a PE license. That doesn't mean the experience is always cutting-edge or earth-shattering.