“I’ve always been interested in electronics, so when I saw the opportunity to learn more about it, I decided to come here,” says Rodney Ensor, who at age 15 is Dalton State’s youngest student.

Ensor, who is a dual-enrollment student at Whitfield County’s new Career Academy, takes core high school classes at Northwest High School and Dalton State College courses at the Career Academy. He says that taking college classes at his young age has been an eye-opening experience, one that he would recommend to his peers.

“I had just a vague idea about electronics before I got here,” says Ensor, who hopes to earn a degree in electrical engineering or computer programming in the not-so-distant future.

“But the class has been everything I expected it to be. I’ve already learned a lot about electronics.”

Ensor especially likes the fact that his instructor is very “hands on,” coming over to each student’s work station to help them understand the concepts and answer their questions.

So far this semester, Ensor and his classmates have taken apart televisions, games, dehumidifiers, and other electronic devices to take a look at the components inside and to figure out how to hook them back up.

Of the 12 students enrolled in Ensor’s Basic Electrical Circuits class, six of them are dually enrolled, which enables them to earn both high school and college credit for the courses.

 “As long as they earn a ‘C’ or above, they will earn college credit for the course,” says Michael Zemaitis, Ensor’s instructor, who said that students are pre-screened to make sure they have the verbal comprehension and mathematical skills to attempt college-level work before placement in dual-enrollment classes.

“Before they take this class, many of them are very capable of performing certain computer-related applications, but they don’t know the theory behind what they’re doing,” Zemaitis says. “So that’s an important component of this course. They need to learn the ‘why’ behind what they do.”

Once a student qualifies for dual enrollment, he or she is entitled to apply for the HOPE Grant, which helps defray the costs of tuition and books.

“We find that the students do get very excited about earning college credit while they’re in high school,” says Wendy Hanson, Guidance Counselor at the Whitfield Career Academy.

Ensor, who plans to attend Dalton State for two years after graduating from high school, is looking into the College’s Regents’ Engineering Transfer Program (RETP), which makes transferring to Georgia Tech to pursue an engineering degree a much smoother transition.