Whether wielding a saw, hammer or paint brush, Carlyn McClelland and Victoria Knight are perfectly at home building a wall, repairing a roof or tearing down a crumbling façade.  The second-year Southwestern Michigan College students’ passion for the construction field has not gone unnoticed.

Last Friday, McClelland and Knight found out they had been selected as 2017 Work Ethic Scholarship recipients from the MikeroweWORKS Foundation. Mike Rowe is an actor, who hosts “Dirty Jobs.” The scholarship seeks to help those in skilled trade jobs pursue an education. McClelland and Knight are among 259 scholarship recipients selected out of more than 1,000 scholarship applicants. The application that McClelland and Knight submitted included three letters of recommendation and an optional YouTube video, in which they talked about their passion for the field.

SMC Instructor Larry Wilson is the chair of the School of Advanced Technology and a lead instructor for the Construction Trade and Green Technology Program. For the past two years, McClelland and Knight have taken a number of his classes, from the basics in construction to learning how to build a sustainable home. In a phone interview Friday, Wilson said Knight and McClelland were prime candidates for such a scholarship award.

“[McClelland] gives 100 percent in everything that she does and Knight is exactly the same way, Wilson said. “It is 100 percent or nothing at all. They are exceptional students.”

Wilson is among those that wrote a letter of recommendation to the scholarship foundation advocating for the women to be selected as winners.

Despite working in a field dominated by men, neither Knight nor McClelland felt intimidated and have since exhibited their passion for the craft.

Knight, 22, is a Niles native. In 2013, she graduated from Brandywine High School and was on the track to pursue her nursing degree in Fort Wayne. After two years into the program and $25,000 in student debt, Knight began to reconsider her path.

“If I kept going for four years, I was going to be $80,000 in debt,” Knight said. “I called my parents and said, ‘I am not doing this.’”

After returning home to Niles, Knight took a step back to evaluate her career path. In the meantime, she worked toward a degree in general arts at Southwestern Michigan College while paying for her tuition rate out of pocket.

Growing up, Knight had helped her father, Victor, who works as a semi-truck driver, repair and renovate her great-grandparents’ home. It was a project she said she enjoyed very

much and it helped to influence her to enroll in the construction program at SMC. Knight is also in a joint program at Ferris University, where she is also pursuing a degree in business.

Last Friday when Knight found out that she was one of the scholarship recipients and would be awarded $2,000 — just under a semester’s tuition rate, Knight was so ecstatic she said she screamed.

“I was like, ‘holy cow that is really cool,’” Knight said. “It is also cool that [McClelland] and I, two people from southwest Michigan got it.”

For McClelland’s part, the 36-year-old resident of Elkhart describes her path as an “evolution.” McClelland is married with two children and earned a degree in criminal justice. She worked as a probation officer in Indiana and said she was dissatisfied with the job. Wanting to learn how to renovate and fix things around her own home, McClelland enrolled in the construction program at SMC. McClelland said the program also offered a chance to lead a healthy lifestyle. After losing 150 pounds, McClelland said she did not want to work behind a desk all day.

McClelland was awarded $7,000 in funds from the 2017 Work Ethic scholarship. Like Knight, she shrieked with delight last Friday.

Up until this year, Wilson said he typically has only one female enrolled in the program. This year, he said he was delighted to see more diversity in the classroom. Currently, six of his students are female, which makes up about 1/3 of the program’s population.

Throughout their time at SMC, McClelland and Knight have sought to show those around them that the field is a great opportunity for women, especially with a number of job opportunities open in the construction trade.

“These are life skills that are useful and practical,” McClelland said. “It is empowering to be able to build something and there are jobs available. More women want to learn how to do these things, they just have not seen it as a viable career option, because it is so traditionally male.”

Construction involves more than heavy lifting and takes attention to detail and a craftsmanship that McClelland said she believes women have a knack for.

In addition to being dedicated students, both McClelland and Knight are working to share their passion for the craft with the community and help other women to become inspired by the field.

This past April, McClelland and Knight gave a presentation at SMC for eighth grade girls about non-traditional jobs. They fielded students’ questions about construction careers and took them on a tour of the 80-square-foot small house they had built for a class project. Knight then suggested to Wilson that the house remain as an educational tool for those interested in the trade. Half of the house shows the electrical components of the building.

Additionally, McClelland and Knight helped to build a house in May for the Habitat for Humanity’s Women Build Week. McClelland helped to found an SMC student chapter of the National Association for Home Builders, which helps students get in touch with national resources and educational information.

Neither McClelland or Knight plans to stop there. In addition to being a student and working part-time at Notre Dame for the company building the stadium, Knight also runs her own company called Resfeber Restoration, where she does a number of remodeling jobs, while McClelland is concentrating on being a student and caring for her family.

“There are so many different elements to the construction industry,” McClelland said. “It is not just the guy swinging the hammer. I think that’s where we come in, is changing that perception of the person behind the hammer.”