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Xcel-lent

Opportunity

Former PRO Intern Pays It Forward 

as a PRO Mentor

AACAL PRO Intern Gabriel Morris had 
only been on the job at Xcel Energy for a couple 
months as a project management intern when 
an opportunity to job shadow other departments 
changed everything. Systems protection engineer 
Francis Dennis suspected Gabriel might be a better 
fi t for his department—and that his department 
might better suit Gabriel’s interest. 

Rewind eight years to Francis’ story which 

uniquely parallels Gabriel’s. A 2011 graduate of Palo 
Duro High School, Francis was also an AACAL PRO 
Intern eager for engineering experience. “Going 
from the internship to college helped me narrow 
down exactly what I wanted to do,” he says. Aft er 
graduation, Francis spent two years at Amarillo 
College before transferring to Texas Tech, where 
he graduated with degrees in electrical engineering 
and mathematics. “If I can make an impact and help 
someone decide on the correct career path for them, 
that’s a good deal.”

But as internship opportunities at Xcel go, 

positions in systems protection aren’t typically 
available to high school students. 

“Systems protection does not hire high school 

interns,” says Francis. “System protection is 
responsible for programming relays, which are little 
computers that control breakers. We program these 
relays to isolate a section of a grid where there’s a 
fault.” When a light pole falls down, for example, the 
relays have been programmed to quickly recognize 
a fault has occurred and turn off  the power to that 
line before it even hits the ground, explains Francis.  

If he and others in his department don’t do their 

jobs properly, someone could get hurt or millions of 
dollars in equipment could be damaged.

But convinced it was the right place for Gabriel, 

Francis decided to see what he could do. “Before I 
spoke to my boss, I gave Gabriel little projects to see 

how well he would do, sort of a little trial 
to see if we could make this work.” 

Th

 en it was just a matter of taking it up 

the ladder. 

It wasn’t long before Gabriel found 

himself working under Francis’ guidance, 
writing a program to identify unique data 
points among thousands of data entries. 

As Gabriel nears graduation, he plans 

to attend WTAMU in the fall and both he 
and Francis are hoping there will be an