Former students laud college's engineering program

Ryan Mitchell, engineer and office manager of Robert Peccia and Associates, received Flathead Valley Community College’s Distinguished Alumni Award for 2012.

Mitchell accepted the honor at the recent Ambassadors and Alumni Spring Luncheon. The award recognizes graduates with career achievements, service to others and passion for the college that “rises above the rest.”

A Columbia Falls High School graduate, Mitchell received his associate’s degree in surveying from the community college in 1996. He then received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Montana State University.

Following graduation, he joined Robert Peccia and Associates, a Montana-based civil engineering and land surveying company. After six years with the company, he was charged with establishing and managing the branch office in the Flathead Valley, where he remains today.

Described as a huge supporter of the college, Mitchell spends many hours mentoring students and supporting the engineering and surveying staff. Each of the five engineering professionals hired by the company since 2005 has been a graduate of Flathead Valley Community College.

 He explained why during a panel discussion about the college’s emerging engineering transfer program.

“It’s simply because I know the quality of students they put out,” he said. “I experienced it firsthand. I know how well-prepared I was when I transferred to Bozeman.”

Mitchell’s high regard for the program was echoed by panelist Mark Waatti, who owns Waatti Engineering in Kalispell. He also was an engineering student at the college.

“I wanted a quality education, and I wanted it to be affordable,” he said. “When I got done at FVCC, I was debt-free.”

 Waatti recently returned to the college where he enrolled in the college’s welding program to meet continuing education requirements for his engineering license. He said he was weary of webinars and dry seminars when he realized a welding class at the college met the requirement for continuing education.

Other panelists were Jim Boger, physics instructor, and Effat Rady, engineering instructor who has seen the program grow from just two students when she joined the faculty in 2003 to 12 last year. She said she judges the program by how well transferring students perform as well as by growth.

“Many of our students are able to achieve 4.0 grade points after transferring from FVCC,” Rady said. “We’re getting very popular at MSU.”

Rady holds a master’s degree and doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Boger, who holds a master’s degree from Montana State University, joined the college three years ago after teaching physics to second-year cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

He confessed that he was prepared to find lower-caliber students at the community college compared to those he taught at the Air Force Academy who arrived with nearly perfect SAT scores.

“It was quite a shock to get up to FVCC and find a group of students who actually performed better than the students I had at the academy,” he said.

Mitchell credited his college instructors with producing well-rounded engineering students who know how to learn on their own and solve problems. Jamesen Motley, an engineering student who transferred to MSU last year, agreed, saying he was better prepared than the average student.

Motley credited Rady with encouraging him to pursue engineering. He joked that it was “the best decision anyone else ever made for me.”

Another panelist was nontraditional student Gunnar Pope, who enrolled in the engineering transfer program with a bachelor’s in another discipline and after operating a construction business in Whitefish.

He called finishing up at the community college this semester bittersweet because of his close friendships with instructors and fellow students.

He moves on to pursue a master’s degree in mechanical engineering with a focus on systems control.

“The decision to return to school has led to some of the most rewarding years of my life,” Pope said.