admin's blog 

By: Mike Adams, PCI Wind Turbine Technician graduate

Please join us at the North Kansas City campus for our 4th annual FREE community health fair!

Today PCI came together to recognize our staff and student body that answered the call to a grateful nation in service to our Armed Forces. With Veterans Day upon us, it was important that PCI’s Military Affairs team coordinated an effort to show our support and honor these individuals. Our campus’ interrupted classes today to hear a remembrance reading paying tribute to our Veterans, Fallen Soldiers, Prisoners of War and Missing in Action. We were all proud to wear our yellow ribbons that signify our appreciation and support of those who have served.  

Have you visited the Pinnacle Online Library yet? Located at www.pinnacleapps.com/lrc the website has a lot of great tools to help you with your classes and your future profession. You may have used the PCI Online Library to connect with the LIRN database for research, but today I want to explore a few of the Tabs featured on the website. I want to point out a few of the links and explain some of the resources that are under each tab that will help you succeed in PCI classes today and when you are working in your new career tomorrow.

I’ve written before about how “new” the wind industry is, but really that’s quite relative. When we look at “The Wind Industry” we’re usually thinking about the utility scale era. Wind Turbines that produce the kind of power that is able to be put on the grid, in other words. In the United States, California was the state to first kick off this type of power production in large scale. This was around the late 70’s to early 80’s and compared to today’s modern turbines those machines are ancient.  But none the less, that was really the starting point for the large scale wind power production that we are headed for. In another 30 years I’m sure we’ll be looking back at today’s technology and be equally amazed at the advancements. 

It can be frustrating to search the internet for a class assignment. You type your topic into the search box and you get back pages and pages of links to choose from… ugh! How can you tell which sites are the best most reliable pages to use in your assignment and which ones are simply commercial or spammy or just plain junk websites?  

Several months ago, I sat in a meeting in which the topic of discussion revolved around better serving our online students through connectivity. The question raised was, how will PCI continue to encourage our online students (who by definition are removed from a campus setting) to be connected with the school? Because this is something that PCI has always strived to do, I had sat in many of these meetings before. I have no intention of bombarding

Being a Wind Turbine Technician isn’t just about having an aptitude for mechanics and electricity. It’s not about being able to brave the heights and extreme elements. It’s not the solitary work and time spent traveling.  It’s not the potential of good money, or the large number of advancement opportunities in an emerging industry. Sure these are important pieces, but really it’s about so much more!

Here in the Student Success Coordinator (SSC) Department, not only do we see a lot of students, we see what they do in their classes. Not surprisingly, the ones with the best grades have several things in common. Check out the 5 most common habits of highly effective students below to see what you’re already doing and maybe even find some areas where you can improve: