Since graduating from the Sustainable Energy Resources and Technologies program at Iowa Lakes Community College , Jessie Moffitt’s been crushing her job as a wind technician with Siemens. “I get to work outside, and I like climbing around like a monkey,” she jokes. “I like to work with my hands. I like problem solving.”
It’s pretty clear to see now that renewables are a great fit for Jessie, but she didn’t always know she wanted to enter the industry. It wasn’t until she was about to graduate from a different college that she happened to hear Dan Lutat talking about the program on NPR and decided to explore it.
“He was talking about wind energy and wind technicians, and I’d never heard of that as a job. He started talking about how they’re looking for people with a strong background in mathematics and physics, which I had,” she says. “The more he explained about their program and the job itself, the more excited I got.”
Jessie says that excitement only grew the more she researched the program. Pretty soon, she was Iowa Lakes CC’s newest student.
“The teachers are really great there. They really do care about their students. They put in a lot of effort to help you understand what you’re doing. They all knew what they were talking about too. They’d all been in the field.”
Jessie might’ve been lucky to catch Dan Lutat’s interview on NPR, but it’s pretty safe to say that the industry is lucky to have Jessie.
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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.