There's music coming from the Machine Shop at the George Washington University.
Tucked away on the basement floor of the Science and Engineering Hall, at the end of a maze of hallways, is a room buzzing with the constant hum of machines and the occasional rattle or roar from an electric saw or grinder.
It’s a space where students and faculty can use industrial equipment as they build and experiment.
Metal shavings and slabs of precisely laser-cut materials, alongside parts of projects just started or almost complete, lie scattered around.
“It’s loud, it’s messy, it’s noisy, it’s dirty,” said Bill Rutkowski, the lab manager at the Machine Shop.
What might feel like chaos for someone stepping into the shop’s doors for the first time has just become part of the daily rhythm of work for Rutkowski.
Over his 30 years at GW, Rutkowski has held different titles, from lab manager to instrument maker.
The role doesn’t have anything to do with musical instruments, Rutkowski explained. But he has fixed a tuba or two—and a trumpet.
“Well, this was years ago, someone who worked at GW,” he said. “Her trumpet went flying down the metro escalator and got pretty bashed up.”
He didn’t know anything about making or repairing trumpets, but he gave it a go. Over several months, he carefully worked out the dents, polished the metal, soldered the seams and returned it to her.
That’s the thing about Rutkowski, he’s the guy people come to when something needs fixing or a problem needs solving. And he’ll find a way to get it done.
When an anthropologist in the Columbian College of Arts & Sciences studying great apes in the forests of Rwanda needed a way to track their development, Rutkowski built a specialized camera system that projected two fixed laser points four centimeters apart, giving researchers a built-in scale to measure the animals directly from photos.
And when a former student working for National Geographic needed a lightweight way to study bears and sea mammals in the wild, Rutkowski helped design a camera collar weighing under six pounds, equipped with GPS tracking and a timed release so it could be recovered after use.
That’s at the heart of what an instrument maker does—find solutions to problems.
For more than three decades, Rutkowski has been building custom scientific apparatus designed to help students and faculty at GW make their experiments and studies possible.
It’s a job that requires him to be innovative.He moves from one challenge to the next and never works on the same thing twice.
It’s the perfect job for him.
When he was a kid, his parents would ask what he wanted to be when he grew up, and the answer was never the same. One day it was a treasure hunter, another it was an Arctic explorer or jungle adventurer.
In many ways, Rutkowski said, this job has let him live all of that out.
Through the work that comes through his shop, he has helped build tools and devices used all over the world.
In addition to that sense of adventure he’s carried since childhood, Rutkowski has always valued being a fixer.
He credits much of that to his upbringing. As a child, he spent hours in his grandfather’s garage, surrounded by cars, boats and a steady stream of projects in need of repair. His father taught him how to fix things around the house, and expected him to know how to handle it himself when they broke again.
His time in the Navy further reinforced the importance of being a person of action. At 22, he left his hometown in New York for San Diego, driven by a desire to do something more, and enlisted. There, he learned to be resourceful, and the importance of being a doer.
“I often think one of the hardest things to teach somebody is troubleshooting. If there’s a problem, how do you come to that problem so it’s fixed?” Rutkowski said.
Over the years, he has watched both his field and the world shift away from hands-on work. Fewer and fewer students come in without ever having taken a shop class in high school. There’s less know-how on how to fix things or build things.
But through all the changes, he has stuck with it.
“I’m proud I held the line,” Rutkowski said. “I held the line for my field.”
And each day, as students come through his shop with problems to solve, he’s there to help them figure it out and pass on those skills.
“Because, what else is the point?” Rutkowski said.
Meet Bill Rutkowski:
This series will tell the stories, experiences and accomplishments of staff and recognize their daily impact on GW. Please enjoy the opportunity to get to know staff from across the university.
