![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog-assets.solidworks.com\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2025\/03\/hamilton_20_rockyhillarticle20.jpg\")
<\/p>\nAmy Hamilton\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t have any experience working with cars. I didn\u2019t know what I was doing,\u201d Amy exclaims as if she still can\u2019t believe what she\u2019d gotten herself into. That year, she cried while driving home after work every day.<\/p>\n
That wasn\u2019t the first time she\u2019d found herself completely out of her depth, however, nor would it be her last. And, like every time, she wasn\u2019t about to let it stop her.<\/p>\n
Amy was born and raised in West Warwick, Rhode Island (she says the town\u2019s name slowly so I can hear it around her accent). Her grandparents owned the Rocky Hill State fairgrounds, so she faced monumental tasks \u2013 like clearing stones from fields and painting all the fairground trash cans and bathroom stalls a hideous green \u2013 from a very young age. While Amy\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In high school, a drafting teacher helped Amy fall in love with what felt like a true art form. She then pursued an associate\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was never treated differently, but I felt like I had more to prove,\u201d Amy explains. It wasn\u2019t until she started looking for a job that the treatment changed. \u201cThe employers thought\u00a0we can\u2019t have an unmarried woman on a drafting floor with 30 married men,\u201d Amy remembers. \u201cThat was my first very cold slap of reality.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d admitted to having no experience in those subjects. They told her she\u2019d be fine \u2013 and she, unfortunately, believed them.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had no support,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI can remember opening the boxes for the tools for the small engine class and crying because I didn’t know what they were.\u201d She worked in survival mode for months, reading the textbook at night to learn the lesson she\u2019d 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 \u201craised by the generation of people who don\u2019t quit a job.\u201d<\/p>\n
And so she didn\u2019t. She bought a book called The Woman\u2019s Automotive Repair For Dummies<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought, oh my God. I\u2019m a teacher. I can do this.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2014understandably fed up\u2014decided to quit teaching, and she didn\u2019t return for eight years.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n Almost a decade later, and on the job hunt again, Amy finally told her grandfather she was considering returning to teaching.<\/em> He responded: \u201cIt\u2019s about time you get back to doing what you\u2019re supposed to do.\u201d<\/p>\n He passed away a week later \u2013 it was literally his dying wish.<\/p>\n So, Amy resolutely got all her teaching certificates in order\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe moment I started playing with SOLIDWORKS, I was like, \u2018oh my God. This is so much easier,\u2019\u201d Amy smiles, \u201cIt was just illuminating. I thought, why haven\u2019t we been using this before?\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201clegacy students.\u201d 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\u2019s Artemis lunar landing mission.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy attended her first 3D<\/strong>EXPERIENCE 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI have such a blast. I\u2019m surrounded by my tribe of geeks,\u201d Amy says of the community she found through 3D<\/strong>EXPERIENCE World. \u201cWhen I leave 3D<\/strong>EXPERIENCE World, I am so full of creativity and inspiration.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 3D<\/strong>EXPERIENCE Worlds.<\/p>\n \u201cI haven\u2019t been this excited in a very, very long time,\u201d she admits. She\u2019s a few years away from her hard-earned retirement, but she still has big dreams for the future \u2013 dreams that will certainly continue to test her. But we already know that Amy isn\u2019t a quitter. She\u2019s determined to be successful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Join us for our Behind the Design series, presenting the stories behind both the designs and the people who created them. Meet Amy Hamilton, a long-time teacher who has overcome every challenge in her life with grit and determination.<\/p>\n... Continued<\/a>","protected":false},"author":676,"featured_media":57346,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,3,26,826,14,18],"tags":[2966,4648,4754,129,176,19,1655,4197],"class_list":["post-57347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-certification","category-community","category-customer-stories","category-dassault-systmes","category-design","category-solidworks","tag-3dexperience-world","tag-amy-hamilton","tag-cloud-apps","tag-design-2","tag-drafting","tag-solidworks-2","tag-students","tag-teaching"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/676"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57347"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57356,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57347\/revisions\/57356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog-assets.solidworks.com\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2025\/03\/hamilton20building20wreaths20_1_.jpg\")
\nCaption: Amy Hamilton building wreaths with her students<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog-assets.solidworks.com\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2025\/03\/win_20211117_09_41_16_pro20_1_.jpg\")