The way a Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) looks varies from student to student. For Phoenix Pitman (pictured above), an SAE looks like days spent in the Rockcastle County FFA workshop designing and painting metal signs fresh off the plasma cutter table.

Pitman is a senior at Rockcastle County High School in Kentucky. His SAE consists of working through the programming necessary to make designs and precisely cut them out. It includes machining and working in his school’s agriculture workshop. Since his agriculture program has a plasma cutter table, Pitman focuses a lot on growing his knowledge on plasma cutting. He began learning how the plasma cutter table and its programs worked during his junior year, but he officially began working with the plasma cutter table his senior year of high school. Operating a plasma cutter table is no easy task; finding the right programs and learning how to properly lay out designs in a way that properly cuts it out can take some trial and error. 

Pitman’s newfound love of plasma cutting has opened up many new career options for him. “CNC machining can go into many fields like medical, construction or welding,” he says.

Dealing with this type of machinery has taught Pitman many different skills, such as problem-solving and learning new techniques when operating complex machinery. Pitman has had to overcome issues he encountered when working with the plasma cutter’s software. For example, when the program has a glitch in its system or a downloaded design doesn’t overlay correctly. After Pitman has finished preparing the final products that he creates with the plasma cutter table, his masterpieces are either given away to a department in the Rockcastle County High School or sold as a fundraiser for his FFA chapter. 

Learning how to operate a plasma cutter table is hard, but once you learn how to, it can become a useful skill depending on the field of study you choose. Pitman’s career goal for the future is to become a nurse, but through his SAE, machining has become his secondary career goal. If your agriculture program has a plasma cutter table, Pitman strongly encourages you to explore opportunities through it.