With welding, I love the joy in it and seeing that last weld that you do to fill it or to
do your gap, seeing it look perfect and look better than the guys or look like something
that you would see on TV or in pictures, and you see it and you’re like, wow, I did that
myself.
It’s a joy.
It’s like a happy feeling in it.
I love welding.
It was something that I’ve been around since I was a kid, and I’ve just always loved
to be around it.
Loved the art of it.
And, personally, I like beating the boys at it.
My grandparents and my parents have had a farm and my great grandparents, so it’s
actually fourth generation farming, and my grandpa has always welded, my brother, my
aunts, my dad – so it’s just really in the family.
On the farm if something did break down, it would take a couple days if we didn’t have
ways to weld things or knowledge about welding.
We would have to wait for someone to come out there and weld it or we would have to
wait for the service truck to come out there and work on it, but with me knowing about
welding and knowing what to do and my family knowing what to do, we can immediately head
back to the farm and get that piece welded and fixed and put it back onto the equipment
and get right back out there to the field and get production going back up again.
I started here and I picked it up so good.
I loved it.
Actually, last week, I did a whole entire piece for the hay rake that had broken.
It was connected to the center and the wheel, and the wheel went into a hole and it completely
broke it in half.
So, I fixed the bar, and we put it back on the hay mower.
It’s a really big one.
We put it back on there, and it's working perfectly fine.
You can’t even tell that it was broken.
We put some coupons over it and slapped some pieces on it, did flux cord and it’s perfectly fine.
While I was a high school student, I finished all my classes my junior year, so that left
my senior year open to anything.
So, my senior year, I did an internship for emergency medical services, while coming here
and doing college classes for welding.
I started off with TIG and welding metallurgy.
Welding metallurgy is just a breakdown of different kinds of irons and metals and ways
that we can put them and weld them together in a different way instead of your normal
electric kind of welding.
TIG, TIG is my favorite. You use this torch and you are using a filler metal
so in the torch is a tungsten and you have lots of heat that is generated into it and
you are basically just dipping your metal into your weld pool and it’s melting it
together.
And TIG is a more precise type of welding.
You have to be very talented, very good at it.
After I get my welding diploma, I plan to go straight into pipeline on the road like
Texas, Idaho, Alaska – places like that.
I want to be a pipe welder because there’s lots of adventuring to do.
You can go to many different states, many different places, see many different things.
And, in pipe welding there’s also a good amount of money, and the money comes from the amount
of danger that comes with this job.
A pipe welder is someone that goes off to these places or you can weld pipe in structural,
which buildings, but a pipe welder on the road, you have these very big pieces of pipes
that’s very thick, and you are going to use either TIG or STICK to weld these pieces
together and you are going to start by making a filling root and you’ll go over it multiple
times and different positions to fill that entirely to the top.
Being one of the only females in the welding program – people like to look down on you
and think that you are not going to do as good.
What many people don’t know is that a lot of female or women welders do much better
coming off because of their steadiness, but people don’t really see you as one of the
guys, so you have to work your way there.
To other females that are in welding, personally, I would say don’t let the boys get you down.
You are going to start of maybe bad, but you will pick it up super easily, and women are
very steady with it, so women, it will just come to them a whole easier, a whole lot better
and women are more focused on things so women can remember to do things over and over that
the guys couldn’t as easily sometimes.