The career crafters

Gray is considerably younger than most of the students here, who pay from about $10,750 to $13,000 per academic year - for one to three years - to learn traditional crafts whose practitioners earn from about $22,000 to $33,000 to start, depending on the craft. The average age of the students is 34, and the vast majority already have earned at least one college degree before deciding to take the work path less traveled.

"I think of this as a one-room school house," says Mary Richards, North Bennet Street's director of student services, "with people of so many different ages, coming from so many different stages of life."

Consider Michelle Abban, a 37-year-old electrical engineer and mother of three young daughters, who is in the second year of the school's three-year course in violinmaking.

Ms. Abban, who commutes to the school from her home in South Weymouth, a suburb south of Boston, says she stayed home for a decade after her first daughter was born, "and when my youngest was approaching first grade and I had time to think about what I'd do if I could do anything I wanted to do, I knew I didn't want to go back to engineering. I looked on the Net and I was thrilled when I found this school. It combines my technical background with the creative aspect. I knit and spin, and I thought violinmaking would be a great occupation."

Abban's oldest daughter, Samantha, is the youngest violinist in a community orchestra in South Weymouth, and now plays a violin her mother made for her. "That is really, really thrilling for me," says Abban. "It's taken years for her to get to where she is, years of going to lessons.... And it took me years to make that instrument - and to see the two things come together is really great."

In order to take her place at a North Bennet Street bench, Abban had to get past Bob Delaney, the school's director of admissions and a graduate of the preservation-carpentry program. "I still plan to do preservation carpentry," Mr. Delaney explains, "but I fell in love with this place, and shortly after I left, this position opened up."

"We are training people in the crafts so that they will succeed and go out and make a living," Delaney says, adding that "every single student who graduates who wants to work in their field does.

"We try to determine how passionate and serious they are. We talk to the applicants, and give them a personal interview," Delaney explains. In the carpentry and woodworking courses, he says, the prospective students "have to have some history of work in those areas; they have to supply photos of work they've done. We're not looking for dilettantes."

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