Friends of Vocational Technical & Agricultural Education,
We are very proud to share a wonderful story of a 2017 graduate of Greater New Bedford Regional.
David
Hard work at GNB Voc-Tech made him a local star. What’s Orgelio ‘Jay’ Soares up to now?
Matthew Ferreira Standard-Times
At age 24, New Bedford resident Orgelio “Jay” Soares has already bought and sold his first home and is in the market for his next, as he continues to climb the ranks at Covanta‘s SEMASS facility in Wareham where he works as an auxiliary operator.
But those who’ve known him a while — or maybe just heard his story — may not be surprised by Soares’ accomplishments. By the time he graduated from Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational Technical High School in 2017, Soares had earned himself a reputation as a star student with an interesting background and a drive to succeed that people noticed.
With straight As for grades and a job in his field already lined up in his senior year, Soares’ work ethic — which, aside from academics, also applied to his three jobs and three high school sports — caught the media’s attention, with The Standard-Times, WCVB-TV in Boston and WBSM in Fairhaven all spotlighting his story; one that includes a globetrotting childhood living in the Central African country of Zambia where he was born and moving to South Africa, Cape Verde, Congo, and back to Cape Verde before arriving in New Bedford.
“I was 9 or 10,” Soares estimates of his age at the time he came to the Whaling City.
As he became acclimated to his new home, Soares’ multilingual abilities came in handy as he quickly firmed up his mastery of speaking English. But when it came to the written word and the demands of the ELA (English language arts) curriculum at school, he struggled.
“I already spoke a little bit of English. It wasn’t perfect, but because I was so young it was easy for me to lose my accent when I was here,” Soares said. “Although I did pick up on the language pretty easy, it was harder for me to pick up on the literacy. So that was a struggle I was going through at school, and I had to spend a lot of time working on that.”
Discovering a new pathway
After struggling academically through his younger school years, Soares found a new groove in the GNB-Voc-Tech stationary engineering shop, finding himself enthralled about learning the ins and outs of the equipment and operations involved in turning rubbish into energy.
“When most people think about electricity, they think about an electrician — somebody who runs the wiring and puts everything together — but where does the electricity that’s produced actually come from?” Soares said of the fascination he had in the field of stationary engineering, or “steam engineering” as it’s often called. “Once I learned more about the trade it was just fascinating to understand the process of trash being burned in order to make electricity.”
It was during his junior year that Soares and his shop mates took a field trip to SEMASS to tour the facility and see a stationary engineering operation firsthand. Soares’s current boss, SEMASS Operation Manager Kevin Crimi — who sits on GNB Voc-Tech’s stationary engineering shop advisory board and helps organize the annual visit — says Soares left a lasting impression that day.
“I remember specifically to this day — I brought the group into a little training room, I sat all the students down, and Jay made sure he was in the front row,” Crimi said. “These kids are 16, 17, 18 years old, so to them it’s just another day out of the classroom, but Jay was actually interested in what I was drawing on the whiteboard, and as I’m asking questions, he’s raising his hand.
So right away I noticed Jay’s interest level and excitement about this facility.
“Then when I bring them into the control room — which is the coolest place in the plant — I always pick a student to sit in the chair right next to my control room operator, and since Jay was the star of the classroom, I let him sit there and his eyes lit up.”
As Crimi’s observations would suggest, the plant made an impression on Soares as well. Before leaving that day, Soares made sure to inquire about the possibility of working at SEMASS the following year as a senior in GNB Voc-Tech’s co-op program, which allows participating seniors to cycle in between working in their shop fields in paid internship-like arrangements and attending school. “In the past they were only doing college students, but Kevin made the spot available for me,” Soares said.
Always thinking a step ahead
During his co-op, Soares performed well enough that when it was time to graduate, SEMASS already had a full-time job waiting for him. And while it was tough for him to recall exactly what age he was when he moved to the U.S., Soares still knows precisely when he started his first full-time position: “My first day was June 6,” he said — just two days after he graduated high school, already licensed for the job.
Starting out as a utility operator, Soares never stopped developing himself professionally, acquiring the skills and licensure needed to advance to assistant auxiliary operator and then auxiliary operator. “It’s monitoring important equipment … making sure everything runs perfectly and it’s functioning, so we don’t exceed our limits, cause any kind of contamination, or break any equipment,” Soares said. “And also keeping everybody safe, which is the main part.
“And then my next goal is to be an assistant control room operator which requires my 3rd [Class] Engineer’s license, which I hope to get before the end of this year.”
For Crimi — who has worked at SEMASS for 34 years — hiring Soares was an easy choice, and an example of why GNB Voc-Tech is an important resource to steam engineering facilities in the area, he said.
“New Bedford Voc is the only vocational school in the country that has steam engineering,” Crimi said. ” For me as an operations manager, I need to hire good people, and so I’m very fortunate that I have a voc-tech 20 minutes away that has steam operators — licensed steam operators.”
Crimi and Soares also noted that the stationary engineering shop is one of GNB Voc-Tech’s smallest. “While I was there, it maxed out at 15 kids. The other shops max out at around 40,” Soares said.
Leading by example
With one of his younger sisters starting at GNB Voc-Tech this year, Soares says he’s helped to equip her with some of the wisdom he’s gained in order to make her high school experience there as fruitful as it can be.
“She asked me what shops she should pick in exploratory so we talked about her interests and what she can see herself doing for the rest of her life, thinking about checks and balances, what things would require her to go to college to get where she wants to be,” Soares said. “She doesn’t necessarily know what she wants to do yet, but she seems to be going toward the medical field.”
For anyone going through challenges like the ones he faced as a young student in a new country, or who simply worry about finding their way, Soares says his advice is to be open-minded enough to recognize the potential of all available opportunities — because the right fit may be found in an unexpected place.
“I never knew I’d become a boiler room operator but after experiencing it and learning about it, it’s just what I like to do. I don’t regret that decision,” he said. “There’s more than one path to get where you want to go and it’s not always the traditional route. You can still get there no matter what your struggles are.”
David J. Ferreira
MAVA Communications Coordinator
David Ferreira
