Students at Pellissippi State Community College are continuing to give a shipping container a makeover, working together to transform the drab, metal structure into a luxurious tiny home.

Welding technology students recently gathered at Pellissippi State’s Hardin Valley campus, where the shipping container is located, to create frames that would allow for the installation of windows into the 40-foot-long and nearly 9-foot-wide box.

“There’s no shortage of applied learning for us, but the real special experience that we get with this is being able to go out to the field,” Max Coffin, a second-year welding student at Pellissippi State, said in late February as he worked on the shipping container. “And that’s an important skill in this line of work.”

Interior design technology received a $10,000 grant for the shipping container project from the college’s Instructional Development Committee in 2024, with the goal of providing students across almost a dozen career programs with a unique experiential learning opportunity and also raising awareness around homelessness.

The work completed last month by first- and second-year welding technology students from Pellissippi’s Strawberry Plains campus, under the tutelage of Associate Professor Adam Streich, prepares the way for the installation of new windows that were donated specifically for the project.

Next comes insulation, then electrical and plumbing.

“To actually see the building of the home is just very, very exciting for us,” Shubzda said. “Experiential learning has been our goal, and we’re already seeing the reward of it. When our students toured the container, they could literally lie on the floor to see where the bed or bathtub would go, because it’s scaled to actual size. There’s no substitute for actually being in the construction space itself.”

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Pellissippi State Community College is a public community college based in Knox and Blount counties in Tennessee and operated by the Tennessee Board of Regents. The college operates four campuses: Hardin Valley, Blount County, Strawberry Plains and Magnolia Avenue.