22
portraits
» AMARILLO ISD
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