Your collision career begins long before your first professional repair order. It begins with how you show up, accept feedback, handle mistakes, protect yourself and treat the people learning beside you. Janna offers an instructor’s unfiltered guide to surviving your first weeks of collision school—from safety and respirator requirements to tool-truck temptation, communication and building a support system. You are not expected to know everything. You are expected to be ready to learn.

A DNA test, a backyard wedding and an unexpected collection of siblings taught Chasidy something she did not realize she still needed to learn: belonging can heal what rejection left behind. In this deeply personal editor’s note, she connects the family that welcomed her without hesitation to the mentors, coworkers and communities that help women find confidence in collision repair. Sometimes confidence does not open the door. Sometimes someone opens it for you—and confidence follows.

Motherhood and career ambition are often treated like two vehicles trying to occupy the same frame rack, and Chasidy Rae Sisk is not here to pretend the industry has figured out how to make that collision pretty. In this deeply personal editor’s note, she reflects on finally stepping into the writing career she had always wanted, only to have life reroute the entire map with pregnancy, caregiving, financial strain, impossible expectations, and the quiet professional penalties mothers are expected to absorb without complaint. This piece does not romanticize burnout or wrap motherhood in soft-focus inspirational nonsense. Instead, it names the frustration, the grief, the sacrifice, and the absurdity of a system that critiques women no matter which choice they make. It also makes one thing painfully clear: motherhood does not erase talent, ambition, intelligence, or leadership. It compounds capability. It forces reinvention. It sharpens resourcefulness. And for many women, it becomes another kind of career training, unpaid, underestimated, and wildly overqualified.

Stepping out of the classroom and into the collision industry can feel like being handed a repair order written in another language while everyone pretends you should already know where every tool lives. In this Frame of Mind editorial, Jannifer Stimmel-Watkins speaks directly to the newest generation of Collision DisruptHERs, especially the students and entry-level technicians preparing to leave training behind and claim their place in the bay. Drawing from her experience as a former collision repair instructor, Jannifer breaks down what young women actually need to hear before they enter the shop: that mistakes are not identity flaws, confidence does not arrive fully cured, and one rough day does not mean they picked the wrong career. This piece covers everything from PPE and procedures to attitude, community, respect, and resilience. It is part send-off, part field guide, and part instructor voice still echoing from the lab: learn the process, protect your body, ask the questions, and stop apologizing for taking up space.