Employee Spotlight

Bart Pietrzak

Why did you choose engineering as a career path?
If you’re in high school in the 60s in Communist Poland and you want to play in a rock band, you have to make your own amplifier. You basically have to put everything together yourself. That’s how I got started.

Where and when did you get your degree and in what discipline?
After high school I went to Technical University of Lodz in Poland. There I got my degree in Electrical Engineering. I went on to get my Master’s Degree in Industrial Automation.

How long have you worked at Applied?
I started working for Applied 4 months after the company was started in 1998. I have the longest tenure after the 3 founders of the company.

What is your specialty? Field of expertise?
Automation or control engineering.

What type of projects do you find to be the most rewarding?
Retrofit projects are the most interesting because there’s an investigative portion where you have to figure out what the problem is; then you fix the problem and make the system work again, hopefully better. You really prove yourself as an engineer with these projects.

What do you enjoy most about your job and working at Applied?
The company is based on the structure that each person is responsible for the success or failure of her/his portion of a project from beginning to end. The initiative to do well on a project has to be yours, and that’s very motivating. If you want to do a project, you have to think through the process of how it needs to be done and then follow through.

Do you have any hobbies or outside interests?
I enjoy taking photographs and going hiking or climbing in the mountains and staying there as long as possible.

Is there anything else about yourself that most co-workers and client contacts don’t know?
As my first project, while still in college, I designed the control system for a press, which packages ham into containers, and this design became part of my Master’s thesis.