February 28, 2022
Employee Spotlight – Lalit Ghatpande
Growing up in Pune, India, Lalit Ghatpande now lives far from where he originally called home. Located in western India, Pune (pronounced “poo-nuh”) is a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the more well-known coastal city of Mumbai. The city’s population of some 7.5 million inhabitants is roughly the same as the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.
When it came time to pursue a graduate degree in electrical engineering, Lalit followed his older brother and tens of thousands of other Indian students to the United States. Lalit moved to one of the smallest college towns in America and attended Michigan Tech University in Houghton, Michigan. Living full-time in snowy Michigan took a little adjusting, but Lalit had seen snow before from his trips to the Himalayas while living in India.
Lalit chose Michigan Tech because of the school’s reputation as one of the best graduate engineering programs in the country. The institution is particularly strong in the discipline within electrical engineering that Lalit wanted to pursue.
Power system protection safeguards an electrical grid to ensure continuity of supply, minimize damage and repair costs when something goes awry, and provide for the safety of personnel. As Lalit began looking for the right place to launch his professional engineering career after graduating, he found SynchroGrid and soon discovered the small Texas company was a “protection powerhouse.”
“All of my graduate work was related to the protection field,” Lalit says. “SynchroGrid specializes in protection consulting and has gained a reputation for being very good at that kind of work.”
“I like the freedom that power-system protection engineers are given here at SynchroGrid to stay ahead of the curve,” Lalit says. “We’re empowered to take initiatives to keep our customers and their systems safe from harm.”
Because of the pandemic, Lalit has not been able to return to India to visit his parents for more than two years. However, his brother has also remained in the U.S., settling into his own engineering career in Denver. Lalit visits him frequently and enjoys the chance to hike and explore the Rocky Mountains.
The Central Texas region which Lalit now calls home offers him a professional opportunity, job satisfaction, and the promise of a bright future.
“Working at a company like SynchroGrid has been a dream come true for me. I appreciate the work culture here, the leadership’s commitment to excellence, and the new knowledge I can get as a protection engineer.”