It finally happened?! That change has been in the works for a while.
Good riddance, that was one of the most onerous and pointless requirements for licensure in the country. The only ones worse than that were the ones they amended out sometime between 2005 and 2012.
No longer EIT, now it is Engineering Intern
I hadn't realize there was a movement to change the title. Curiously, the legislation doesn't have the housekeeping provision about transferring the existing EITs into the new license. This may force the Board to do some extra internal paperwork.
Still cannot take PE exam early (decoupling), and PA still does not accept NCEES Record for initial licensing.
If there was any internal desire by the Board to decouple, then it probably would have happened with this bill. I don't expect many more states to decouple in the future.
Back in the old days, you had to be an EIT for 4 years, subject to the same discipline as a PE.
Sometime between 2005 and 2012, Pennsylvania amended the requirement that the PE candidate for a certain discipline had to work under a PE from the same discipline, and get recommendations for in-State PEs from that discipline. The requirement made it effectively impossible to get licensed in certain disciplines in the Commonwealth.
With this new law, you can be a PE the day after you become an EI. I'm all for taking the PE exam early, <snip> Old school PEs were subject to 4 years of discipline before becoming licensed.
The way I read the law is that a candidate, under the right circumstances (i.e. ABET degree, working 4 years under a PE, etc) is theoretically eligible to take the PE exam the same day they are licensed as an EI. But realistically, neither the applicant nor the board isn't going to process the paperwork fast enough for that to ever happen.
(c.1) "Engineer Intern" means a candidate for licensure as a professional engineer, who has been granted a certificate as an engineer intern after successfully passing the prescribed written examination in fundamental engineering subjects, and who is eligible upon the completion of the requisite years of experience in engineering, under the supervision of a professional engineer, or similarly qualified engineer, for the final examination prescribed for licensure as a professional engineer.
but not too crazy about this experience before EI counting towards PE licensing.
It's not as bad as you may think. This corrects a legal and bureaucratic technicality that wasn't helpful to the profession or the public.
The law was written so that the experience must be earned AFTER the EIT license. But, one didn't become an EIT after passing the FE exam automatically. And that's where things became a major pain. Back in the day in PA, a graduating senior had to apply to take the FE, then submit another application with a copy of their transcript mailed from the university indicating they graduated, before they could get the EIT license. And only after the board approved the EIT did the clock start ticking. And this process would snowball a bit and delay being allowed to take the PE exam four years later in October. How you ask?
Here's my example from 2005:
Take EIT (mid April)
Graduate (officially early May)
Get snail mail letter from NCEES that I passed the FE. (early June)
Immediately, fill out EIT application and overnight it to the Harrisburg. Order a transcript from the university and pay for it to be expedited.
Hope that the board receives and processes it all before mid-late June. Why then? Because that's when the PE exam applications are due four years later.
So if you miss getting everything done fast in June then it sucks to be you. Because the earliest you can take the exam is April nearly 5 years later. It doubly sucks if you are taking a once-a-year exam only done in October.
In practice, this meant that most PA engineers had to get 4.5 years of experience, as most weren't so fast completing the paperwork. Or they forgot to fill it out for months or years. Which delays the clocks even more. FWIW, by 2007 the board started backdating the EIT license to the day NCEES notified them of the FE pass.
And this was a well known issue. Profs were constantly reminding the graduating seniors that had to do things quickly. Even some employers were pushing their new hires to move quickly. I remember a board member visited my university to talk about the process, and he lamented that it was an issue and the were powerless to solve it. He said the experience requirement in PA was effectively 4.5 years as a result.
What's worse, is that the engineers moving to PA, didn't know about the technicality because, with the exception of Ohio, the exact date of issuance of the EIT never mattered. FWIW, Ohio changed their law about 10 years ago. So you wound up with a bunch of your EITs realizing that they had to jump through another hurdle to get liscensed in their new home state. Or you had some PEs move to Pennsylvania, who wouldn't qualify for license by comity because of a technicality. For a while, they would have to retake the PE to get licensed there. In later years sometimes there was a comity workaround, sometimes there wasn't.
The only thing that provision did, was piss everyone off. The applicant's hated it; the board and their staff knew it was stupid and didn't like it but they couldn't change it because it was a law and not a regulation; and employers and businesses didn't like how it gummed everything up.
tl;dr The experience was almost always gained post graduation under the supervision of a PE anyway. It was just dates on a certificate that didn't line up.
