Muskegon Community College announced Feb. 9 that Ryan Wheeler, a 1994 alum of Whitehall High School, is its 2024 recipient of the school’s most prestigious award for alumni, the Distinguished Alumnus Award.
Wheeler obtained his associate’s degree from MCC in 1997 and went on to earn a bachelor’s from Michigan Technological University in 2001, and later added dual master’s degrees from Iowa and Iowa State. Today, Wheeler is a senior technical fellow of advanced visualization at Collins Aerospace, one of the world’s largest companies in the field. He’s based out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Wheeler shared news of his award on his public LinkedIn profile and noted that in his senior year at Whitehall, he took early morning classes just to be able to scrape by and graduate in the bottom 25% of his class.
“The thought of becoming an engineer was as alien to me (at that time) as becoming an astronaut,” he said in his post.
However, Wheeler said he was inspired to get into the field by a work-study job he obtained at the school’s electronics lab early in his MCC career.
Wheeler told MCC’s website in an interview that he stresses the importance of always moving forward to young people, even if it isn’t always necessarily as fast or easy as it may seem for others.
“What matters infinitely more than some arbitrary timeline of when-you-should-be-where in life is to just…keep…moving…forward,” Wheeler said in the MCC interview. “And as you move forward, opportunities will arise. When they do, step up. Take a chance on them and on yourself.”
