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From Shop Girl to Wind Technician to Community College Electronics Teacher
Kalie self-describes herself as a “shop girl” in high school. She loved hands-on learning and the metal shop in high school was her favorite place where she spent more than half her time, taking welding and robotics classes and doing activities with the electric car club. Because Kalie didn’t have the financial or life circumstances to allow her to afford a four-year program, she was looking for a trades program as her next step when she saw a faded flyer on a bulletin board for the Renewable Energy Technology program at Columbia Gorge Community College (CGCC), which she subsequently enrolled in.
The teachers at CGCC taught her valuable fundamental concepts of electricity and troubleshooting skills. Through high quality instruction she learned the tools to build her own approach to solving technical problems, breaking the situation into what she knows and what she doesn’t know and learning to address each unknown and eliminate it or fix it. She feels that it was the development of her own process that was crucial to her future success.
She graduated from Columbia Gorge Community College’s Electronics/Wind Technology program at 19. In the next eight years, her community college education allowed her to be hired for three different careers. First, she was a field wind technician for GE for several years, before being hired for a 13-month position as an electrician for the U.S. Corps of Engineers at Bonneville Dam; and then she was recruited to her current job as a full-time teacher at the community college she graduated from.
Kalie credits three teachers for shaping her entire career path: her middle school algebra teacher, her high school shop teacher, and her community college electronics teacher. Each of them gave her encouragement and were knowledgeable and passionate about their subject. Each was supportive and mentored her and were great examples to her of what a good teacher could do for students, especially her high school metal shop teacher who regularly took students to weekend electric car events on his personal time.
Kalie has been a trailblazer. She admits that it can be challenging to be the only woman, like she was for all her years as a wind technician, working with all male teams in the field. She found she had to prove herself repeatedly, and figuring out the culture took longer than other recruits who were male. But she eventually won her team members’ respect. It was also enlightening going from being the only woman on the GE team to joining a department at the Bonneville Dam where a woman had been a successful technician for over 30 years, which aided Kalie to be listened to and appreciated.
When she began teaching at the community college, she used these experiences to be better able to answer challenges her students had about her ability to teach them industry-ready skills, as they became enthusiastic about learning from her when she described her wide range of experiences in different industry situations. She especially likes to teach students how to develop their own process for troubleshooting. Adaptive troubleshooting is an emphasized skill at CGCC because graduates of the Electro-Mechanical Technology program pursue technician careers in a variety of regional industries, including wind, solar, hydroelectric, and avionics. Local breweries, logging mills, and manufacturing facilities also hire service technicians out of the program.
Kalie continues to challenge herself personally and professionally. She is attending workshops and conferences and implementing new strategies such as developing a dual enrollment electronics program with local high schools. She has also recently applied to continue her education in a part-time B.S. in Electrical Engineering program and she has pursued mentoring to acquire pedagogy training to continue to improve her abilities as a teacher.
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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant #2201631. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National ScienceFoundation.
