Landon Chenevert of Ocean Springs originally wanted to be a marine biologist until he visited MGCCC’s Jackson County Campus on Bulldog Day his junior year of high school.  

“I took a tour of the Precision Manufacturing and Machining Technology lab and fell in love with the program.  That’s what I’ve wanted to do for a career since then,” he said.

Chenevert now works at Specialty Machine Inc. in Gulfport. “We mainly produce heat exchanger units, so my job is a lot of drilling and tapping holes,” he said. “Most of the time there has to be hundreds of holes drilled, so we do it on our CNC drill press. We write the program with all the locations of the holes, load it up in the machine, and let it have at it.”

He credits the college with preparing him for his job.  “My experience at MGCCC prepared me extremely well for going out into the industry. Mr. (Willie) Showah teaches a fantastic program that is focused on industry standards. I recommend anyone looking to be an inside machinist to take his program.”

Chenevert has participated in the college’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) program, as he is still taking classes at the college to complete his associate degree. “Carla Stout did an excellent job teaching us essential skills as part of the QEP. We did exercises where we were to read a procedure and had to pass the message on to someone else without missing any detail, which helped improve our listening and speaking skills. We also would ‘clock in’ when we got to class, and always tried to be there earlier than class started. We learned that if you’re on time, you’re late.  If you’re 15 minutes early, you’re on time.” 

He said the practice on essential skills prepared him well for his current job. “Learning those things has helped me do a better job, and I think I was maybe more prepared to do the job than a lot of other people starting out.”