The first time that seventeen-year-old Autumn Mayo tried arc welding, she felt invincible.
“Holding my own clamp and arc welding myself, I felt like powerful like Zeus,” Mayo said. “Like I’m holding lightning. It was crazy.”
Mayo, who graduated from Sitka High School this spring, started welding less than two years ago, when she signed up for a metalworking elective with teacher Tim Pike. When they started the welding portion, something just clicked.
“I liked the rhythm you needed, like, the hand-eye coordination, and the almost Zen state,” Mayo said.
Going to college had never felt like quite the right path for Mayo – but for a long time, she wasn’t sure what was the right path.
“I knew that I wanted to go to some sort of education after high school, but I wasn’t sure what yet,” she said. “Even through all of my high school career, I was between options and jobs, but I wasn’t quite motivated for any of them. I didn’t have the drive.”
With welding, she could see a future.
“I just started welding, not even considering it as a possible career until I realized how much I enjoyed it,” she said. “And that I was good at it, and it could be a career, and it’s something that I’d want to really focus on and get better at and improve. So it was like a crazy surprise.”
This fall, Mayo is headed to Universal Technical Institute in Arizona for a one-year vocational training program. There, she’ll learn four different types of welding.
And she’ll join the ranks of a small but growing category: women in welding. Women make up only 5.8 percent of welders, according to the most recent survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As a rural, Alaska Native woman, Mayo is in an even smaller category. She says she didn’t think much about that when she applied to school, and that she doesn’t feel limited by her gender.
“I’m very girly,” she said, laughing. “You know, I love pink. I love makeup and dressing up. And I love welding.”
So much so that when she was penning invitations to her graduation this spring, a welding manufacturer, Hypertherm, made the short list.
“I wrote them a grad announcement, just detailing a little bit that I’m graduating and going to UTI, and they’re invited if they want to come, and I drew a little picture of a guy welding or girl welding,” she said. “And then I didn’t really think much of it.”
Hypertherm didn’t attend her graduation, but they did send her a surprise: a professional-grade plasma-cutter, which can cut and gouge metal, that retails for over $2,000. Mayo says as an entry-level welder, a new plasma-cutter would have otherwise been out of reach.
“I probably would have gotten something secondhand, you know, still starting out right out of trade school,” she said. “So just to have that already under the belt is a blessing. I’m so thankful. It’s so nice.”
Mayo leaves for school in August. She says after training, she wants to work welding boats.
