She Has the Drive to Learn to Be an Automobile Mechanic

Brenda Kochevar needs variety in her life.

First she tried banking. Next came computer testing, then sales.

Now she is learning to fix cars at Ventura College.

“I just cannot do the same thing, day after day after day,” said the 29-year-old single mother of four, who lives in Ventura. “It just drives me crazy.”

Kochevar has always been handy, changing oil and spark plugs and doing tuneups on her own and friends’ cars. “I wasn’t married, and I couldn’t afford to have someone else do it,” she said.

What was once a hobby has evolved into a vocation.

Kochevar is the first woman to apply and be accepted into the college’s 3-year-old Toyota Technical Education program, known as T-TEN and part of the college’s general automotive repair program. The community college is one of 60 nationwide that Toyota Motor Corp. has chosen to participate in the manufacturer-subsidized program. Toyota pays for students’ books and tuition, and promises jobs to those who become skilled mechanics.

Out of 15 applicants this year, Kochevar is one of nine to be accepted into the two-year T-TEN program. The other eight are men.

“It really made me feel good, because I was really nervous about it,” said Kochevar, who lives on a fixed income and said she appreciates the $160 for books and tuition Toyota pays each semester.

Auto repair provides her with the variety she craves. She likes “having to figure out what’s actually wrong and why,” she said.

Only one woman has completed and earned a degree in Ventura College’s general automotive repair program in the decade that Chuck Rockwood has been an automotive technology instructor there.

Although eight other women have taken auto repair classes, none of them have earned a degree in the general program, he said.

Being in the minority does not bother Kochevar. “I get along better with men,” she said.

She has not always been warmly received by her colleagues. One student in her class laughed at her in the beginning. But now that he sees she is serious, “he’s kind of stopped laughing in my face now,” she said.

“Automotive repair typically has been a man’s world,” Rockwood said. “It’s always been considered heavy, greasy, dirty work, needing a lot of muscles, I guess.”

But, he said, “technology is changing, and we’re getting more and more into computers and electronic systems.”