Spring 2025 SoCal Field Trip

23 ASHRAE club students, joined by club advisor Lauren Rueda, traveled to the Los Angeles area for a two-day trip packed with educational and professional development opportunities. The students toured ACCO’s Pasadena office, beginning with a welcome from ACCO President and CEO Jeffrey Marrs, who was himself a member of the ASHRAE club during his time as a student at Cal Poly. During their visit to the ACCO office, the club members were able to tour the building’s mechanical systems, learn about HVAC systems from small scale training setups, and ask a panel of Cal Poly alumni questions about the HVAC sector and the transition from school to work.

ACCO engineers, joined by members of the Krismar general contracting team, also led the students on a tour of a job site at The Ranch at Warner Brothers. The site includes multiple large sound stages that will be used for filming movies and television, and the tour included information about the engineering design decisions that were made to reduce mechanical system noise in the sound stage space, as well as to make the ventilation system flexible for a wide variety of setups for the sound stages.

In the evening the group attended the SoCal ASHRAE Chapter Meeting and Student Night. During the event, awards were presented for student scholarships as well as to companies for cutting-edge projects. Three student teams, including two from Cal Poly, presented their work on the ASHRAE 2025 Applied Engineering Challenge and 2025 Design Competition.