Philo teen wins national engineering contest

ZANESVILLE – The first year Mikhayla Ferguson qualified for the National Youth Engineering Challenge, she won first place in her category — welding.

Ferguson, 19, of Philo, has been chasing the national challenge for years. She began welding when she was in fourth grade and started taking projects for 4-H after that. She’s taken numerous projects to the Ohio State Fair, and she won — a lot — but she never qualified for the national challenge until last summer, which also happened to be her last year in 4-H.

“It was pretty big,” she said about winning the challenge. “I worked so hard.”

Ferguson built a welding table, which is now sitting in her father’s garage, being put to good use. Most of her projects over the years have been items her family could use, such as benches, tables, boot scrapers and a flatbed trailer for hauling four-wheelers.

For the national challenge, Ferguson had to make a presentation about her step-by-step process and take a written welding test. The challenge was smaller than it had been in past years because the event organizers had originally wanted to end the contest’s affiliation with 4-H, so Ferguson competed against two other people in her category.

There were about 70 to 80 competitors, she said. Out of those, six were girls, including Ferguson.

Ferguson doesn’t think it’s weird that she’s a girl who also can weld, but she knows it might be surprising to other people.

“Where I grew up, girls do the same as boys,” she said.

A few years ago, at Ferguson’s third or fourth year at state, her brother had modeled his project out of a catalog and built it entirely out of stainless steel, which not a lot of people have just lying around, she said. The judges initially assumed that he bought it rather than built it.

Since then, Ferguson and her brother began documenting themselves completing every step of their projects.

Her father, Rod, who is a certified pipe welder, has never dissuaded her from pursuing welding, and he’s always willing to show her, even if he’s shown her a million times already, how to complete some part of a project, Ferguson said.

“He’s always driven me to do the best I can do,” she said.

She and her brother Zach, who is a few years older, won the state fair multiple times together, in different categories. And once Zach got too old for 4-H and stopped competing, Ferguson started competing in his category and building bigger projects.

And now she worries about who is left to compete in welding from Muskingum County.

“I’m gone now, so they might not have anybody to send to state,” she said.

Welding takes a lot of time and resources, and without someone to act as a guide, at least in the beginning, like Ferguson’s father, brother and mother Robin did for her, she said, fewer and fewer kids would be able to gain the skills to learn.

“I would encourage anyone ... if it’s what you want to do, go for it,” she said. “You can do pretty much anything if you put your mind to it.”

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