About USCTI > USCTI Scholarship Program > Autumn Ohl

Autumn Ohl, OSG USA, Inc.

2021 Scholarship Recipient Winner

I heard about this scholarship through my dad, Brent Ohl, who works at OSG Tool & Die which is a partnering company under USCTI. I was looking for scholarships during my senior year of high school, and my dad reached out to some people within his company in which they sent back this opportunity. The money that I received from the scholarship went into paying for part of my first semester of college at Kent State University, where I am majoring in Aerospace Engineering.

This was a pretty big big award, so having received it will make funding my education much more accessible in the future. Being awarded this scholarship was great in helping me out financially, but the biggest takeaway from earning the scholarship was being able to attend USCTI's 2021 Fall Meeting in San Antonio, Texas. This was really the first time that I was able to directly connect with people from industry and interact with "the professional world". Attending this conference, I sat in on meetings about economic outlooks into the following year, ways to bring people into the industry, and other discussions that gave me a broad perspective of how things operate within the cutting tool industry.

When returning from the conference, I received an email from a journalist that works for Cutting Tool Engineering Magazine about wanting to interview me about my experiences with this scholarship. Being interviewed for a magazine was an entirely new experience, but one that was very rewarding. When that article was released I posted about it on my LinkedIn page, where I had recently connected with everyone I met in San Antonio, and my first boss, Kevin Johnson, commented.

Kevin congratulated me on winning the scholarship, my experience, and asked me if I had any interest in interning with his company, Fischer Special Tooling. I accepted his offer, and worked in his shop during the summer of 2022. This internship opportunity was huge for me, and gave me real, hands-on, engineering and manufacturing experiences. These skills have now led me to being offered many other internship opportunities for the upcoming semesters, to which I am very grateful for. These opportunities that I am currently being offered, in my opinion, would not be possible without having won the 2021 USCTI scholarship. All of the things that I have learned from earning this award, and the knowledge that I have gained, have allowed me to make huge strides in progressing within my professional career.