April 11, 2018—Two female students from Tennessee College of Applied Technology (TCAT) won gold medals in the 2018 SkillsUSA state competition in Tennessee on March 22.
The students’ instructor at the college, Timothy Chastain, said a woman placed each field of the competition.
Caitlin White and Breanna Britton of TCAT were the only women to compete in their fields of refinishing and estimating.
Both women went through a round of job interviews and, during the second day of the competition, were asked to perform their skills.
Britton had to paint a roughly 1-by-3 foot panel with a gold metallic paint. Part of Britton’s training over the past year was aided in the use of a SimSpray that afforded her a week of learning paint techniques with a virtual reality system.
White had to take an ASE test and then write estimates for three cars.
Chastain’s students are in the collision repair program for one year and work in classrooms and a shop that is roughly 7,000 square feet in size. Each year, the program seats 30 students.
And on average, only two or three of those students are women, Chastain says.
