I have been teaching at a local community college in the Engineering Technologies division for the past five years part-time; I guess you could say the student became the master! It is a very rewarding job as I get to pass along what I have learned in my 8 years of drafting and design to a younger generation. It is often my duty to speak to middle schoolers and high schoolers to entice them to come to take classes at the college; a spokesperson if you will. Many times, I give them my spill about how I love my job, and how I have never "worked" a day in my life because I enjoy what I do for a living.

Today, I was thinking...."Why do I love this field so much?" Why is it that I work 40 hours a week doing it full time, 10+ hours a week teaching it to young minds, and the rest of the time doing contract work for SLDD?

It all started when I was about 8 years old; you see my favorite toy(s) of all time were LEGOs. You know, those blocks you get to build and design things with. If you didn't like it, tear it down and start over again. My sister could attest to the many hours I spent in my room just building away. It then hit me one day, that "when i grow up," I wanted to design things. So once I hit high school, I took every math & science class that I could from physics, principles of technology, drafting, to geometry, trigonometry, etc... I well prepared myself for college and my career that would follow afterwards.

But back to the question at hand--"Why do I love drafting so much?". I guess you could say it all goes back "designing" things with LEGOs. I like solving problems with parts & assemblies. I like seeing them come to life in the formed of machined, cast, molded, parts that I can actually hold in my hand. I can say "I designed that". There are not many people that can say that. I will never forget my first job here at SLDD was to design a sheet metal enclosure for an PCB. A few months after completing it, the customer called me and said that he had some production units in and wanted me to see them. I drove over there immediately after work to take a look. I could not stop looking at them; rolling them around in my hands and just looking at every design detail that "I" had put into them---no one else. I had put the venting holes on there in the pattern that I wanted, I had folded the metal the that I wanted, I had used the standoffs that I wanted to get the PCB to sit at the right height. It all came down to a sum of decisions that created a working, functioning product----and here I had it in MY hands.