The Bradford Gang

Making the big move to Pittsburgh is easier with help from friends

BY KIMBERLY WEINBERG

Steve Werner ’72-’74, bottom left, and his best Pitt-Bradford buds gathered on campus the year after they left. Others pictured are (clockwise from Werner) Dr. Mitch Joseph and Dr. Dave Robinson. The other two alums have been lost to time.

NO ONE IS LONELIER THAN A FIRST-YEAR student dropped off at college.

“I was 1,000 percent alone,” said Alexis DeFilippo ’15-’17, who would spend two years at Pitt-Bradford before going to the Pittsburgh campus to finish her degree as a materials science engineer. “Going to a small campus like Bradford forced me to make friends and reach out.”

She made friends the way many first-year students have done over the years, sitting on her stoop in the “Zoo,” a U-shaped group of townhouses with green space in the middle that’s always a popular place in the fall.

“I was sitting on the stoop looking lost, and an RA had a bunch of students sitting at a picnic table doing some sort of activity,” she said. The resident assistant, the gregarious Zachary Hadfield ’17, convinced her to take part.

“I was hell bent on sitting on that stoop, but those people at that picnic table became my best friends. I was just at one’s wedding last week.”

Deep friendships form on a small campus, but what happens to those students who have to transfer to the Pittsburgh campus to finish their degree, as all students did in the early years and a handful of majors still do today? They take a Bradford gang with them.

Steve Werner attended Pitt-Bradford from 1972 to 1974, where he met lifelong friends Mitch Joseph and Dave and Libby Robinson. He graduated from the Pittsburgh campus in 1978 with a degree in civil engineering.

“I met my best friends at orientation during the summer of 1972, and we have remained close ever since,” he said. “Our three families basically grew up together. While we settled in different parts of the state, we have gotten together every year for family outings, football games and a couple of Bradford reunions.”

Brandon Chavel ’95-’97 spent two years in Bradford before heading to Pittsburgh with fellow engineers. “We felt a little isolated from the rest of the students because we knew that we weren’t going to be there for all four years,” he said. That helped create camaraderie within the engineering class that made the leap to the Pittsburgh campus more manageable.

“I still have friendships and relationships that I know from Pitt-Bradford,” said Chavel, who went on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees in civil engineering from Pitt as well.

William “B.J.” Wright ’88-’90 and his friends Dave Moniot ’88-’90 and Scott Wivel ’88-’90 made the leap nearly a decade before.

“I definitely developed a peer group in Bradford,” Wright said. “It didn’t prevent us from making friends down there at main campus, but it definitely was helpful. Many of the people I ended up with in my study groups were Bradford people.”

A Bradford student who was a year ahead of him, Tom Pfaff, helped him academically, and Wright was friends with the students who had been at Bradford after him, too, overlapping by just a year in the small program.

Wright, Moniot and Wivel bonded for life on the Bradford campus, not only studying engineering together, but also pledging Sigma Lambda Chi together and playing intramural floor hockey and broom hockey together.

Today they work together at Moniot’s company, Venture Engineering, where he is the president and chief executive officer. Wivell is the vice president of business development, and Wright is the vice president of projects.

DeFilippo said her Bradford friends helped her navigate the mostly male world of engineering.

“I already had the respect of the guys from Bradford when I moved to Pittsburgh,” she said. “The other guys who were there saw the Bradford guys be cool with me, so they were cool with me.”

For Austin Jadlowiec ’18-’20, having friends in Bradford helped him make the transition during the pandemic. After staying in Bradford and attending computer engineering classes remotely during his junior year, he moved to Pittsburgh and moved in with two Pitt-Bradford friends who had made the move earlier.

“It was nice to be able to just move down here (to Pittsburgh) and hang out like I was in Bradford,” said Jadlowiec, who will graduate in August. “You can’t take the Bradford out of the boy.”