Seeing through you: EET grad lands sought-after role repairing diagnostic imaging equipment
John Hamilton’s profession is the picture of health.
A 2012 graduate of Red River College’s Electrical Engineering Technology program, Hamilton works as a field service engineer at Philips Healthcare, where he maintains and repairs diagnostic medical imaging equipment. That includes machines related to X-ray, ultrasound, computerized tomography (CT) scanning, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and nuclear medicine.
In other words, if someone can see right through you, it means Hamilton is doing a good job.
“We’ll get calls from different hospitals around the region. My territory is Manitoba and northwest Ontario, so I’ll go as far as Dryden to do work,” Hamilton says. “Usually we get a call that there’s an issue or something wrong with their system and we’ll go in and troubleshoot, order parts and repair.”
Prior to entering the EET program at RRC, Hamilton was halfway through a computer science degree at the University of Winnipeg, but found it wasn’t the right fit for him.
“I didn’t like it because I was going to be just sitting in front of a computer all the time, doing coding and not working hands-on as much, so when I heard about the Red River program, I signed up for it,” he says. “I really enjoyed the program because it gives you some aspects of that (computer science) but it also gives you a lot of hands-on skills as well.”
“I like that the program covered a lot of different areas. It wasn’t too focused on one stream. I was able to do some biomedical courses in there too, so I got a taste of what I’d eventually do. It was everything from PCB (printed circuit board) design to how circuits work, so it gave me a really well-rounded knowledge.” Read More →