As a child, Nathanual Hower, 17, of Lansford, may have spent more time taking apart his toys to see how they worked rather than just playing with them.

"I always just really liked how power got from one place to another. I always was fascinated by that, by anything electrical or with electronics. As a little kid, I had a little screwdriver set, and I was always taking any toy apart to learn how it worked, then putting it back together," he said.He started at Carbon Career and Technical Institute as a junior. Now poised to graduate from its electrical construction and maintenance program, Nathanual aims to go into industrial motor control."You do the conveyor belts, you do the variable frequency drives to slow down high-speed packaging, using all the sensors and stuff, using ladder diagrams to get them all working with the programmable logic control. It takes five years of schooling to get to that point to learn how the whole systems works in unison," he said.The course of study is a "lot more head-twisting. There's a lot more theory behind a lot of the electronics. It's always new technology. You don't work on something old, because they are usually upgrading," he said.It's not an easy course."When you get into the program at CCTI, you decide whether you read the books or don't read the books. But if you are actually going to pursue it as a career, you'd better read the books, because you can't fake the theory," he said.Nathanual won the Builders Association Award for Electrical Construction and Maintenance, was a SKILLS senior state medalist, the Outstanding senior in Electrical Award, and the Principal's Award. he also placed on the advanced level in Electrical Construction and Maintenance in the National Occupational Competency Testing Institute exams.