Four Homewood-Flossmoor High School graduating seniors have been selected for internships as part of the Exelon Generation program.
Blake Van Niel, Paris Napue
and Nolan Cardona will be
participating in an Exelon
summer internship program.
(Photo by Marilyn Thomas/
H-F Chronicle)
Nolan Cardona, Paris Napue, Blake Van Niel and Kayln Wright who are enrolled in the College Engineering course at H-F, will be working at the company’s headquarters in Warrenville for 10 weeks starting June 6. Exelon Generation is one of the largest competitive United States power generators, and parent company of Illinois’ Com Ed.
H-F is the only high school participating in the program that typically focuses on incoming college sophomores, said teacher Tony Svozil who helped establish the partnership.
In 2015, H-F had three students in the program – Austin Harris, Jaylen Williams and Noah Wojcikowski. Exelon has hired them back for a second round in the internship program this summer working at a nuclear power plant.
The three have shared their experiences with H-F students outlining the work they did as interns and how beneficial the Exelon program will be for them in their careers.
“I’m frequently reminded of how lucky I am to have gone to such a great school as H-F which has done such a phenomenal job preparing me for college,” Wojcikowski, a student at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, told Svozil.
Svozil believes students have a head start in the Exelon program because of H-F’s extensive pre-engineering programs, including Engineering Design, Principles of Engineering, Digital Electronics and Civil Engineering and Architecture, and the high school’s partnership in Project Lead the Way that gives juniors and seniors opportunities to work with engineers, architects and construction specialists.
Select H-F students are earning college credit through the semester-long Illinois Institute of Technology’s IPRO Program (Interprofessional Projects Program) working on projects alongside IIT engineering students. This school year, 10 H-F students have been in the IPRO program.
Cardona, of Flossmoor, said the H-F Electronics Engineering class he took as a junior helped him select electrical engineering as a major at Iowa State University.
Although College Engineering is Napue’s first engineering course, she finds it “shows you different types of engineering.” The Flossmoor resident will enroll at Spellman College for undergraduate work and plans to earn an engineering degree at Georgia Tech.
Van Niel, of Homewood, is undecided on an engineering major. He is completing the IPRO program this semester and is anxious to start in the Exelon summer internship.
Wright, of Homewood, will major in engineering at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She’s focused on science and math classes at H-F.