It’s All About the Math

Meet Falon, one of our awarded students!

Falon Merrick is an alum and a student. That’s right; after she graduated from the Welding program at Spokane Community College, she decided to continue at SCC and study Hydraulics and Pneumatics.

Pretty impressive. It gets even more so when you realize she did her first program while working three part-time jobs and raising her three girls as a single mom. The math for how many hours there are in a day for all of that seems impossible. Good thing Falon is great at math.

After completing her first year of hydraulics and pneumatics classes this spring, she was listening to some employers speak to students. The owners of Alaska Hydraulics talked about their internship, but how it’s not something they were planning to fill this year. See, the intern would have to move to Alaska for the summer.

Falon spoke to the owner later and said, “what if I can find a place to live?”

That’s where she was this summer: working an internship with Alaska Hydraulics in Anchorage, renting from a friend. She went out on service calls, worked on various pumps and motors, fixed cylinders, and took pieces back to the shop for repair. Oh, and she did math.

“Math is something I struggled with, so I thought I couldn’t do college,” Falon said. “The welding program was set up in such a way that it was easy to learn. That broke the barrier that math is too hard for me.”

Sometimes the life math of juggling kids and work and school got hard though. An emergency aid award took the stress off so Falon could fully commit to school and her girls.

“It was a life changer.”

As is Falon. Thanks to her dedication and drive, she’s changing her life and the life of her family. That sounds like good math to us.