Paducah Innovation Hub

“I signed up for the career options class back when I was a freshman,” Nichols said. “I tried welding, carpentry, auto tech and then auto body. Carpentry is the class that stuck out to me, so I stuck with it.”

She had some experience with carpentry from a young age. Prior to taking the carpentry courses, she worked on small projects like building tables with her grandfather and renovation work with her stepfather.

“The house that I lived in, my stepdad kind of customized it from the ground up,” Nichols said. “We demoed it and stuff, and it kind of brought all of our family together because it was something that we built from the ground up that we could call our own. We all had a part in what made it home.”

Nichols said compared to the other technical classes like welding and auto body, carpentry seemed to come natural to her. She likes to work with her hands and finds the ability to create that comes from carpentry rewarding. She said the classes also taught her about independence and being able to recover from setbacks.

“You learn that mistakes are bound to be made and that you can’t really mess up too bad,” Nichols said. “Anything’s fixable, nothing’s impossible to fix. You just have to be in the mindset and have the like attention to detail to figure out how you can fix something.”

One of her favorite memories from the carpentry classes was working as a foreman over a class project building a deer blind, where she designed the plan and oversaw its creation from a blueprint to a complete structure. She also won the Skills USA Regional competition for cabinetmaking. Nichols said getting involved with Skills USA opened a lot of opportunities for her and she’s thankful to her teacher Tyler O’Brien for encouraging her towards it.

“He’s a relationship-oriented teacher,” Nichols said. “He’s really good with students because he really cares about us succeeding. He does everything in his power to help all of us find jobs and make sure all of us are safe and loving what we’re doing. He has our best interest at heart when it comes to the students.”

Nichols currently works at Heritage Construction, working on demo houses. She said she is learning aspects of carpentry that can’t be covered in her classes by building homes from the ground up. She plans to continue working with the company through the end of the year, then pursue ministry school to become a pastor.

She said while ministry is her calling, she will likely continue doing carpentry work on the side both as a hobby and as a means of supplemental income. While it may not be her main career path, Nichols said she will carry the skills she’s acquired from carpentry work with her for the rest of her life.

“I think that the value of the trades is basically not having to rely on anybody to do anything for you,” Nichols said. “Having the ability and the knowledge to take care of yourself and having resources that make you capable of doing things yourself is really important. I’ll never have to hire an electrician or a plumber or any of those little things because I don’t know how to handle it. I’ll know how to do it myself. It teaches you a lot of life lessons and teaches you how to mature in a way that a desk job maybe wouldn’t. It kind of prepares you for the real world.”