Starting Somewhere

I did welding for the first time today.

Well, sort of.

Today, in Welding class, we went into the work room and got to practice stick welding. I...have not done ANY welding before...and it showed. To me, at least.

I got the electrode I was welding with stuck to the workpiece...three times. I got one electrode red hot, and bent over (yes, I do realize how dirty that sounds). My most successful weld was just a bunch of randomly sized and shaped blobs (kind of) arraigned in a line across the workpiece.

I have a long ways to go.

I really hope I can pass this class. I mean, I have good attendance, and that helps a lot! (For most of the stuff we do, you have to physically BE there.) It's just...I feel really intimidated. There's three (or is it five?) guys in my class (I think it's just three) that have plenty of welding experience already. Me? I got nothing.

Sometimes...it just seems like everyone else in class is just so much BETTER than I am! Almost everyone else has had at least SOME experience out in the field, doing machining work. I don't.

When the first semester of my second year started, I kept having this lingering paranoid feeling. At some moment, someone was going to approach me, telling me that there's been some terrible mix-up, and that I wasn't supposed to be there. It faded after the first few weeks, but now it's starting to return.

Oh, well. There's not much I can do, except (try to) move forward. After all, everyone has to start somewhere, right?

Right?