The Girl Who Fell in Love with a Virtual Welder Just Became the First Woman to Medal in Welding at WorldSkills
At 21, Mikala Sposito turned a childhood Maker Faire fascination into a bronze medal on the world stage, and a new chapter for the skilled trades.
When Mikala Sposito was ten years old, she wandered up to a virtual welding exhibit at the Maker Faire at The Henry Ford museum and didn't leave its orbit for the next eleven years. Her parents figured it was a phase. It wasn't.
On Sunday, September 27, in Shanghai, that phase became a bronze medal at the 48th WorldSkills Competition, the event often called the Olympics of the skilled trades. Sposito is the first woman ever to medal in welding in the competition's history.
A spark, and a strange bit of fate
The virtual welder that hooked her had a hidden connection. Years later she learned that Alex Pazkowski, who would become her coach, was part of the team that built that exhibit after his own WorldSkills run. Pazkowski won silver in welding at the 2013 competition in Leipzig, Germany.
Sposito didn't know it at the time, but the person who helped build the machine that sparked her dream would end up coaching her to the podium.
Building a champion, one booth at a time
She took welding classes through a regional consortium while at Dexter High School in Michigan. As a senior, she won the SkillsUSA Michigan state championship and finished 14th nationally. After graduating in 2023, she enrolled at Washtenaw Community College (WCC) in Ann Arbor, home to more WorldSkills welding alumni than any other U.S. school. In 2024 she won the college-division state title, and she set her sights on Shanghai.
Then the real work began. Her training week grew from 50 hours to 60, then 70, then 80, sustained for months. Birthdays, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve: she was in the shop for all of it, and she practiced at a home lab on the days the college lab was closed. She has said she gave up a typical 21-year-old life for the goal.
Pazkowski gave her one rule from the start: hard work beats talent.
Winning the right to represent the country
In March 2026, Sposito faced the USA Weld Trials in Huntsville, Alabama, run by the American Welding Society. The trials score precision, safety, technical execution, and craftsmanship across multi-process welding tasks under tight time limits. The prize was the one welding slot on the U.S. team.
She finished first, ahead of finalists from Utah State University Eastern and an Arkansas high school program. That made her the first woman to earn the spot, and it came with a $60,000 scholarship from AWS and Miller Electric. She plans to put it toward a welding engineering degree at Wayne State University.
Shanghai
Before the competition, her team prep took her to Australia, Canada, and China. In Shanghai she competed over four days in a field of 37 welders from around the world, part of a global event spanning 64 skills.
She scored 723 points. China's Qiansen Zhao took gold with 735, and two welders from Korea and Thailand shared silver at 728. Sposito tied Japan's Ooki Fukui for bronze, finishing twelve points off the top of the podium after more than two years of preparation.
"Who's the best welder"
Everyone has been quick to call her a first, but Sposito has kept her focus on the work. As she put it, the scorecard has no line asking whether the welder is a man or a woman. It only asks who's the best welder.
Her coach said the same thing early on: be remembered as the best welder who ever did this, not just the first woman to do it. In Shanghai, she became the first, and she did it on the strength of her scores.
Why this matters for the next generation
Sposito's story is a reminder of what the skilled trades offer. They have real standards, measurable excellence, and a path that can run from a community college lab to a world stage. Her coach, and two other WCC instructors who competed at WorldSkills, now teach the next group of welders, so the pipeline keeps feeding itself.
A ten-year-old who stopped at a museum exhibit is now a world medalist. Somewhere, another kid is standing at that same exhibit right now.
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