[Kevin Sevcik]

Weeellll. It was rather silly. My high school Autocad teacher knew the owner of an AV company, and he wanted some help with drafting onelines and I needed a summer job. So I interviewed, along with a few other student, and I got the job. I went back several summers in a row. The company changed names and ownership a few times, and has since folded, but I had contacts at another AV company around town. I've temporarily landed there while I've finishing off a pesky tech writing class and planning on grad school and a masters, and will probably work part time there while getting my degree.

There's two sides of the AV business. Install and shows. I've been doing install work. We design AV systems for corporate boardrooms, churches, etc. Then we sell the equipment and... install it. I've moved up from grunt draftsman to programming the computer control systems that generally tie the boardroom equipment together and present a simple interface to the user. However, like any occupation, you learn a lot about everything. I need to pretty much exactly how things work and need to go together to draft a one-line or wrtie a control program, so I learned a lot about all the equipment. I picked up a lot of extra information on the way.

The AV work done at FIRST events is the shows side of the business. Less complicated from the design standpoint, as your staff is running everything and knows what they're doing. More complicated because you're constantly stepping into an unknown situation and having to make things work. That's about all I can tell you aside from it requiring a lot of travel.

Obviously I came into the business in a rather odd way that's somewhat useless to you. I'll ask around at work and see if anyone feels like reminiscing, however. The AV biz is a bit insular, and most AV people in an area know everyone else. This makes it a bit hard to break into the field, I think. I know that unless you have prior experience you'll probably be starting out as a basic technician and working your way up from there. If I recall correctly, some of our guys started as Data/Telcom techs and switched over to AV since by then they had basic skills at wiring and such.

It suddenly occurs to me that you might be more interested in the production and video editing side of things, though. And I have utterly no idea how one gets into that part of the biz, but I'll see if the guys at work have suggestions.