Alumni reflect on working at Penn State Wilkes-Barre

DALLAS, Pa. — At Penn State Wilkes-Barre, students have opportunities to help finance their education through part-time work. Federal work-study is one of the four types of financial aid available at Penn State Wilkes-Barre, where 91% of students receive financial assistance. Students are eligible as determined by their Free Application for Federal Student Aid, the application to be considered for federal grants commonly known as FAFSA, and can apply to work in a variety of flexible positions on campus.

Some departments on campus offer internships or other part-time positions. In this story, two alumni reflected on their workplace experiences at Penn State Wilkes-Barre.

Kyle Neiswender

Kyle Neiswender, who earned a bachelor of science degree in surveying engineering in 2018, worked in the Office of Continuing Education as a work-study student throughout his time at Penn State Wilkes-Barre. Today, he is a light detection and ranging, also known as lidar, technician based in North Carolina.

A graduate of Columbia-Montour Area Vocational Technical School, he chose to pursue a degree at Penn State Wilkes-Barre after learning the campus is the only one in the state to offer a four-year degree in surveying engineering.

“I loved the rural location. I grew up on farmland and in the woods, so it felt like being home,” Neiswender said. “It’s a lovely campus, especially in the evenings when the sun is setting or when it snows.”

His work-study primarily included helping with the summer youth program by doing database work and other office tasks to help promote the program to local schools. He was also a member of the Surveying Society at the campus and went several times to the Pennsylvania Society of Land Surveyors’ annual conference of land surveyors in Hershey, where he was able to meet and interact with surveyors and other surveying students. Neiswender served as club treasurer and during his senior year, he received the Club Member of the Year award during the Student Government Association spring awards ceremony.

He said the flexibility of the work-study position and his supervisors allowed him to balance work with his studies and extracurricular activities.

“They worked around my class schedule and I planned my schedule to keep it manageable. I didn’t want to overload myself with work so I would only pick up two or three hours a day, and I tried to do it over lunch or in between classes,” he said. “Then I would have afternoon classes and then go back to my apartment to study at night.”

Neiswender said the position was ideal for his situation as a college student and taught him valuable skills.

“I was able to see what an office environment is like and how an office is run,” he said. “I had to make a lot of phone calls and use different computer programs, so I developed a good understanding of those skills. I loved going in and working there. Everyone was super friendly and helpful if I ever needed anything.”

In addition to his studies and position at the campus, Neiswender worked for PennDOT during the summers, first as a flagger and later as part of a crew building box culvert bridges.

After graduation, he took a position with a surveying firm in Wilmington, North Carolina. Neiswender now works at the engineering company WSP as part of a specialty division of their surveying team for their office in Mooresville, North Carolina. He is also pursuing his North Carolina professional surveying license. As part of his job duties, he does mobile scanning work for client projects, extracting lines and point symbols from lidar data and creating drawings from the data.

“My work-study at Penn State Wilkes-Barre helped me get a good basis for the communication I use in my job,” he said. “I have to talk to clients to learn what they want and make sure they have a good understanding of what we are doing. I learned those communication skills through my work-study position.”

Russ Kalnoskas

While some students opt for work-study positions at Penn State Wilkes-Barre, others, such as Russ Kalnoskas, are hired for internships with various departments. Kalnoskas began interning with the campus information technology (IT) department as a sophomore. He stayed on with the department in a part-time role until he graduated in 2008 with a bachelor’s degree in information sciences and technology (now information technology). Today, he works in the University’s IT department, based at University Park.

Kalnoskas, who graduated from Bishop O’Reilly High School, grew up near Dallas and chose to live at home while pursuing his degree.

“I liked that it was local and cost effective. It was less than 20 minutes from my house,” he said. “The small class sizes were great, especially my higher-level core classes. We had total access to our professors and that was a great resource.”

During his internship, he assisted at the campus help desk troubleshooting IT issues for students, faculty and staff. He helped build the lab computers and install operating system software in the Nesbitt Academic Commons when the building was constructed in 2008. Kalnoskas was also tasked with photographing the construction of the building throughout the process.

Toward the end of his time at Penn State Wilkes-Barre, a systems administrator at University Park — and fellow Penn State Wilkes-Barre graduate — encouraged Kalnoskas to apply for a position in his department. He was hired for the role of systems design specialist and began the position two weeks after graduation. He has remained with the department since that time, building, developing and launching services used for about 12,000 computers across the University.

Kalnoskas frequently works with Commonwealth Campuses, including Wilkes-Barre, on managing labs cooperatively and assisting with issues. Most recently, he has been rebuilding a server and configuring systems at each campus.

“Because I was already working at a Penn State campus, I had an innate knowledge of what the environment looks like,” Kalnoskas said. “When I came into my current job, I knew how things worked. I was already doing a lot of what I do now, just on a smaller scale. It was helpful to understand the campuses and have an idea in my head of the layout and how things operate.”

One of his major work assignments came at the beginning of the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020, when University IT staff had to pivot quickly to transition faculty, staff and students to a fully remote environment.

“Within a week we set up a brand-new service that enabled students to use their home computer and browser and access all the services they needed from home,” he said.

Kalnoskas credited his internship at Penn State Wilkes-Barre with helping him develop many of the skills he continues to use in his position.

“I was able to get experience through the internship that I still use to this very day,” he said. “It taught me how things really are at a Penn State campus. I got to work with the tools as an intern and now I actually run those tools for major operations.”