My Personal Shop Experience

It was effective that Lauren was able to conduct the majority of the interviews this weekend. My own experience, as a former ID shop monitor, was challenging to set aside during the questioning; she says she is much more of a novice, which is great for obtaining an objective view. Although I am trained in proper interview techniques, and tried not to ‘lead the witnesses,’ I had to keep myself from jumping in with my own experiences and observations. But here, I can record my thoughts; yay!


I worked as a SCAD ID Shop Monitor for about 6 months last year. I remember the experience as being very stressful; my goal was to make it through my time there without ever seeing an injury, and I took my responsibility to protect the safety of the students very seriously.

I remember observing that many students didn’t have much fear of some of the machines, and would take it very personally when I, or any of the other monitors, had to correct what they were doing. Some students felt comfortable asking us questions if they were unsure, but many did not. I occasionally would observe that, particularly on the Band Saw, even though a student knew that they were breaking a safety rule they planned to continue until one of us stopped them…Scary and frustrating.

The Table Saw was the machine that I remember students making the most ‘mistakes’ with, but that may be because I find that machine to be the most dangerous. There was also a lot of confusion with the Mill and Metal Lathes, but that was more from inexperience with the precise controls and less about ignorance of safe procedures.

Cleaning the shop and bench room was as big of a problem as it is now. Students were under the impression that Monitors are paid to clean up after them, and get a real attitude when we asked them to stop what they were doing to clean. Because it was such a pain to motivate them to do the right thing, I eventually quit asking all together, and did one big cleanup of the shop at the end of the night.

2/06/2005