We have just finalized the selection of students for our 2019 workshop, and are over-the-moon excited about each of one of them. When we announced our vision for the workshop last month, we hoped that we would get at least six applications so that we could fill every slot. As it turns out, we received over 10 times that many – all of them incredible. It was hard selecting from this heap of letters because it wasn’t like we were sorting the good from the bad. There was nothing to cull. As we started reading through them, we decided to focus on discerning where the candidates were in their lives and the goals they hoped this workshop might help them achieve. We sought to choose a diverse group of people with skills and strengths that would be complimentary. This afternoon, we completed our last FaceTime interview and put together the final list of our six students.
We will, of course, be blogging about this week and our students this June, but for now, we want to say “thank you” to every single person that applied. It took Mike and me a long time to work through them, but it was some of the best reading I’ve done in a long time. So many of our readers are only names (or, at best, faces) to us so to hear about your experiences, passions, and hopes for future woodworking gave us a boost of inspiration to keep on course with the multi-faceted efforts of Mortise & Tenon.
Thank you for your support and enthusiasm, folks. It is always wonderful to hear from you.
-Joshua