Intern Jacob Horsch- L&B Plumbing

Hi my name is Jacob Horsch. I have two older brothers, three younger sisters, one mom, and one dad. This year I will be interning at L&B Plumbing. I had never really thought about plumbing or anything I wanted to do till the end of my Junior year. My uncle who has been a plumber for twelve years approached me and asked if i’d like to work over the summer. I accepted and wasn’t really sure if i’d enjoy it and want to continue it or just do it for a summer and move on.

I ended up really liking it, and when I heard about the senior internship class, I thought it would be a great way to gain more experience in this field, and really decide if it was right for me. To become a certified plumber you have to apprentice for two years then pass the plumbing license exam. That uneases me a little because the exam is all about safety codes, and regulations and a lot less of things you actually need to know, but I guess that makes sense cause you will learn that while you’re apprenticing. While interning I hope to learn more about the certain codes you have to pass to make a house OSHA approved. An inspector comes and checks your work every time you finish a certain point in a house, I want to learn what he’s checking for and how I can do it myself. Not only would this make the exam a lot easier, but if I ever decided to have a house built, the average cost of plumbing on a new house is $60,000-100,000 however, I could cut that in half doing it myself. I am set apart from competitors because I started young, and will have more experience than anyone my age. In plumbing the more experience you have the more you can do, and the more you can do the more money you make your boss. Bosses seem to like that in an employee. The average salary of a plumber is near $50,000. If you enroll in a plumbing technology program available at most universities or comm. colleges , then you can get your masters in plumbing. With a masters you have authority to self-employ or even start your own business. The salary for a guy who runs his own  successful plumbing business is more like $200,000.

For my future plans I would like to go to WSU and get a degree in business. With that degree I would like to eventually start my own business in commercial plumbing. L&B Plumbing does mostly residential and new home construction. There's a lot less of a headache in residential plumbing than commercial plumbing, but there is good money to be made in commercial. You make contracts with businesses like McDonald's or others, and every time a McDonald's goes up in your area you get to do it, and instead of getting paid for however long you are there working like in residential plumbing, you just get paid a set amount which can be crazy high like $25,000 for most McDonald's even if it only takes a day or two of work. With residential plumbing you for how many workers are there and for how long. A certified plumber is $200 an hour at a job and an apprentice is $100. The problem with commercial plumbing when building hotels, motels, restaurants, etc. is that the safety inspections get a lot tougher, and there are a lot more codes you have to follow. When doing residential and new home plumbing, some counties don’t even have inspections. If you build anywhere around the Saint Joe area your house doesn’t even have inspections. A lot of businesses will do their own, because that’s just good honest business, but it let’s you get away with a lot of pointless codes. There are no counties where there aren’t inspections for commercial plumbing.

There is a huge demand for plumbing in a lot of states like Kansas and Texas where more people are retiring from the field than are entering it. Plus people are always going to be building new houses, remodeling, water heaters will go out, people will want new appliances, and much more. Plumbing is a profession that will be around for a long time. As long as people drink water you will need a plumber to get it to them.

This is why I chose plumbing as my internship. It’s a fun and exciting career, where you never do the same thing every day, and you’re never in the same place every day. There is a lot of problem solving, and taking things apart to see what's broken and fix it, then put it back together. You also get to work with your hands and see what you have done, where a lot of office jobs you just punch numbers into a computer and it's not very satisfying, unless that’s the type of work you’re in to, but for me I like working with my hands.