Transcript

CNS was proud to be one of the major sponsors at the first ever Oak Ridge High School Welding Rodeo. It was held at the school in mid-april. Students from Oak Ridge, Campbell County, Lenoir City and Lavon high schools took part in the half day event. Among the judges was why 12 master welder Jeff Hankins Welding. You know, it's a manipulative skill and it just depends on how hard you work. I have kids when I taught that you have. Four years, it wouldn't progress that far. And then I had kids that went went beyond what we were able to teach him at the high school. As someone that made a living doing that, the best thing about these contests is that puts the kids in an environment outside their comfort zone. Somebody besides the guy that's teaching them, where the woman that's teaching them is going to evaluate and judge them. And it's very similar to a higher end Weld test. It's a lot more nerve wracking. So this puts them in that uncomfortable or awkward situation. It's good real world practice. Throughout my time in school, I had a lot of people who encouraged me and gave a lot of. Time to me to help me progress in my welding journey. So for me coming here today is to help give back and help encourage those kids to be able to discover what they want to do with welding because there's a lot of opportunities. You can do hands on welding, but you can also go into robotics. There's so many avenues of welding that doesn't necessarily involve the quote UN quote, getting dirty every day. I've always like kids, like promoting and encouraging them to be successful. I speak sometimes I go and speak at different schools and just kind of let them know that you know, the opportunity is there. You can make a really good living. They were very inquisitive and asking questions and if they needed help with something they were coming to find one of the proctors just very forward thinking and wanting to do well and I see that taking them very far in their life and coming to be Y 12 or perhaps.