Behind the Design: Amy Hamilton, “Raised by a Generation of People Who Don’t Quit”
Amy Hamilton’s first job out of college was teaching small engine repair and auto shop at a high school in Worcester, Massachusetts. There was only one problem.
“I didn’t have any experience working with cars. I didn’t know what I was doing,” Amy exclaims as if she still can’t believe what she’d gotten herself into. That year, she cried while driving home after work every day.
That wasn’t the first time she’d found herself completely out of her depth, however, nor would it be her last. And, like every time, she wasn’t about to let it stop her.
Amy was born and raised in West Warwick, Rhode Island (she says the town’s name slowly so I can hear it around her accent). Her grandparents owned the Rocky Hill State fairgrounds, so she faced monumental tasks – like clearing stones from fields and painting all the fairground trash cans and bathroom stalls a hideous green – from a very young age. While Amy’s father and grandfather taught her how to build pretty much anything with hand and power tools, her grandmother showed her how to run the business: renting booths, organizing prizes and booking talent.
In high school, a drafting teacher helped Amy fall in love with what felt like a true art form. She then pursued an associate’s degree in applied science and machine design at the Community College of Rhode Island and paid for it herself by working various part-time jobs. She was the only woman in her class.
“I was never treated differently, but I felt like I had more to prove,” Amy explains. It wasn’t until she started looking for a job that the treatment changed. “The employers thought we can’t have an unmarried woman on a drafting floor with 30 married men,” Amy remembers. “That was my first very cold slap of reality.”
And so, determined to prove them wrong, she returned to school, earning a bachelor of science and industrial arts from Rhode Island College in three years. There, she studied subjects like graphics, architectural design, and construction.
That was when she realized she wanted to teach drafting, which takes us back to the high school in Worcester. Amy was hired to teach small engine repair and auto shop, even though she’d admitted to having no experience in those subjects. They told her she’d be fine – and she, unfortunately, believed them.
Needless to say, she was not fine. She was one of five career and technical education (CTE) teachers at the school and, as usual, the only woman. None of them wanted to help her.
“I had no support,” she recalls. “I can remember opening the boxes for the tools for the small engine class and crying because I didn’t know what they were.” She worked in survival mode for months, reading the textbook at night to learn the lesson she’d have to teach her students the next day. She was resolved to succeed. A mentor told her to leave the job, but she says she was “raised by the generation of people who don’t quit a job.”
And so she didn’t. She bought a book called The Woman’s Automotive Repair For Dummies and got help from the siblings and parents of some students. She must have been doing something right because she ultimately returned for a second academic year. But it was only at a later long-term subbing position at a Warwick middle school that it all started coming together for her.
“I thought, oh my God. I’m a teacher. I can do this.”
The kids loved her. They did bridge building, graphics, silk screening, card making, and even holiday wreaths. But then the CTE budget was slashed, and Amy was let go. At that point, her old drafting teacher from high school was retiring and urged her to apply to take his place. When a man was chosen in her stead, however, simply because he was a man, Amy—understandably fed up—decided to quit teaching, and she didn’t return for eight years.
Caption: Amy Hamilton building wreaths with her students
At first, she worked in the graphics industry. Then her husband got an interesting job offer in Florida, and so they packed up and drove down in their small Nissan Sentra. Their things squeezed in so tightly that Amy sat with her knees up against the dashboard for the entire trip. In the sunshine state, she worked a variety of part-time jobs for several years, everything from taking tolls on the turnpike to hosting at Denny’s.
Almost a decade later, and on the job hunt again, Amy finally told her grandfather she was considering returning to teaching. He responded: “It’s about time you get back to doing what you’re supposed to do.”
He passed away a week later – it was literally his dying wish.
So, Amy resolutely got all her teaching certificates in order and dove back in. It was while teaching at a high school summer program in 1998 that she was first exposed to CAD software when a fellow CTE teacher began teaching his students Autodesk. Curious as ever, Amy started to learn it, too. Over a decade later, she was asked to teach SOLIDWORKS.
“The moment I started playing with SOLIDWORKS, I was like, ‘oh my God. This is so much easier,’” Amy smiles, “It was just illuminating. I thought, why haven’t we been using this before?”
Her county eventually bought a district license, and Amy began cutting the names of her CSWA-certified alumni into boards she still hangs up in her classroom. She refers to them as her “legacy students.” Now there are about 200 of them, and one of them is an engineer at Blue Origin, one of the aerospace providers working on NASA’s Artemis lunar landing mission.
Amy attended her first 3DEXPERIENCE World in 2019 and has now presented at every one since 2020 when she hosted a session on how to prepare middle school students for the CSWA in Nashville.
“I have such a blast. I’m surrounded by my tribe of geeks,” Amy says of the community she found through 3DEXPERIENCE World. “When I leave 3DEXPERIENCE World, I am so full of creativity and inspiration.”
When the Covid pandemic struck, she moved her students onto the SOLIDWORKS Cloud, making them the first middle schoolers in the world to use the cloud version. Now, Amy is also a SWUGN leader, and she has big plans for future 3DEXPERIENCE Worlds.
“I haven’t been this excited in a very, very long time,” she admits. She’s a few years away from her hard-earned retirement, but she still has big dreams for the future – dreams that will certainly continue to test her. But we already know that Amy isn’t a quitter. She’s determined to be successful.
