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LLEW: My name is Llewellen Powell.
I don't think I had something where, I was like, yeah,
this is my calling and what I'm going to do.
I think I wanted to be a spy or something like that, nothing
that I had really thought out at all.
I just like figuring out how things work together.
I had bought myself a motorcycle and the motorcycle
was sort of questionable.
So I was like I like learning how to do things,
you know it'd be really cool if I could fix this thing up
and get it running.
It's an alternator.
I am 34 years old
and I go to school at the Benjamin Franklin
Institute of Technology.
I bounced around a little bit when I was younger.
I was born in Richmond, Virginia,
lived in North Carolina for a little bit,
lived in Charlottesville, Baltimore,
Colorado for a little bit, lived in California
for a couple of years, then I moved to Boston.
My first attempt at college didn't go terribly well.
I didn't really know what I wanted to do
and worked random jobs.
I was like this is not the most rewarding thing in the world.
But I had the chance to go back to school,
so I was like it would actually be really cool to understand
how cars work.
I went to Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology.
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Woah.
INSTRUCTOR 1: A lot of students come in the same situation as Llew,
pretty much ground zero.
LLEW: The curriculum I'm
in focuses on hybrid and alternative fuels technology.
INSTRUCTOR 2: What are you going to feel for.
LLEW: Clearance, rock rotation, all that stuff.
INSTRUCTOR 2: Right
LLEW: If you want to know about how to fix cars,
you're going to have to hybrid cars, alternative fuels.
There has been a paradigm shift.
If you don't know how to do the stuff,
you're not going to be employable in any real sense
as a mechanic.
The traditional framework is around standard combustion
engines, like American muscle cars.
And the hybrid thing is going to change all that.
INSTRUCTOR 2: With the automotive industry changing
significantly, you guys in the alternative fuels
industry will probably increase your income significantly.
STUDENT 1: If you're planning for the future and planning for your career,
you've got to be smart and think hybrids is where it's going.
LLEW: This is new and this is interesting stuff,
so to be really engaged in it is pretty cool.
We've gotten a grant from the National Science
Foundation, which helped us build the garage and the lab.
What is ATE?
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INSTRUCTOR 1: ATE stands for Advanced Technological Education.
NSF filters down money to ATE,
which finds projects to fund for students to be able to learn
technical education.
We got equipment.
We've got hybrid vehicles.
We got a multi fuel engine so you can see the actual flame
as the engine runs.
LLEW: We get access to all this cool stuff
that we didn't have before.
INSTRUCTOR 2: The government is trying to get people trained
and working on cars and not just cars but other things.
We have solar, we have wind, we have hydro power.
All this stuff is going to be coming up, up, up.
LLEW: Oh, that's true.
INSTRUCTOR 1: Once there was power applied to it,
if it was in the car, then you would
know if the alternator was going to function.
LLEW: I actually really like doing this,
and I'm good at learning it.
STUDENT 1: I went to college before I came here
and I was doing awful.
And every since I came to Benjamin Franklin, started
doing I love, I've been on dean's list
every semester, getting good grades.
So-- and I'm really happy and grateful.
LLEW: I took apart a hybrid transmission today.
You asked me that six months ago, I
would've been terrified of it.
But I feel skilled.
I feel like I have knowledge and experience
for the rest of my life.
Any place I am, you can use this stuff.
It's worthwhile stuff.
Something doesn't work, do some work on it,
and then the thing that didn't work does work.
That's a concrete satisfaction that you
don't get from a lot things.
There's a sense of accomplishment
there, which is pretty awesome.
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