Heartland Community College Alumni Interview

Dustin Fox has been fascinated by electronics and how they work for many years.  He recalls going into RadioShack as a kid and playing around with the gadgets sold there, eventually getting himself a small solar cell and experimenting with it to make a DC motor turn. As Fox became older, that same passion shifted towards renewable energy.

Luckily, Heartland Community College and its renewable energy program was right down the street. “The program’s lab hours were really beneficial to students,” he says, “because it gave students the chance to apply what they learned in lecture and from textbooks. Hands-on experience like that is important,” Fox says, “because it is one thing to learn from a book, but once you’re face to face with a problem it’s “110 percent different.””

“They literally had a section of the roof in the lab so you could mount photovoltaic arrays, drill the holes, everything. Once you did that well, you would go outside and do it on an actual roof on a shed. So there’s a lot of real world experiences. None of this was just in theory. It’s exactly what you would see if you were doing it in the field.”