5 ms·

Aerospace companies find engineers at a college race-car competition

100 points by happy-go-lucky 9y ago

hprotagonist 9y ago
CMU buggy also has a good track record for being a way to get hired.
onesun 9y ago
I was heavily involved in solar car racing during college, so much so that my grades suffered because of it. But for the most part that didn't matter. Most recruiters I spoke to ended up being much more interested in the stories I could tell about all the challenges we had as a team and the novel solutions we invented to overcome them. I knew that if I talked to a recruiter and they only focused on my GPA, then that was a good sign I didn't want to work there. After my first job, GPA became irrelevant. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing. Fifteen years later, I still count my teammates as some of my best friends.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Which team was yours? I've been following the solar races quite intently, some of the work is amazing.
  - onesun 9y ago
    I raced Mizzou's SunTiger 4 in 2001, then became Mechanical lead and Project Co-manager for SunTiger 5 in 2003. Mizzou's solar car team changed to a hydrogen car team for the eco-marathon competition after ASC 2005
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Cool I found a whole bunch of pictures: http://mizzou.orgsync.com/org/mizzouecoracing/Media_Press http://mizzou.orgsync.com/org/mizzouecoracing/Media_Press
- isatty 9y ago
  I'm heavily involved in one of the AUVSI's autonomous vehicle competitions where recruiters from SpaceX etc show up frequently. I'm a senior now and my grades have suffered as well. I wouldn't say it was purely because of the competition - but I've a similar experience to yours where recruiters love stories from the competition and about how we managed to achieve our goals. I've learnt a LOT of stuff that I wouldn't have managed to in class. Similar to you, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing.
  - eloycoto 9y ago
    How envy I am! I'm working mentoring some students to get this projects. Local companies don't see any value on this, you can't imagine how frustrated I am sometimes.
    - colechristensen 9y ago
      What do they do and how could they be out-competed?
- humanrebar 9y ago
  This is partly why we should be more open to non traditional educations. I don't see why someone needs an entire four year degree to be able to contribute to these kinds of engineering problems. There are certainly "university level" subjects that need to be covered, but that could easily be taken as needed. Or in a more condensed form.
  - colechristensen 9y ago
    I think you are quite wrong, at least in the narrow sense covered by SAE competition engineers (and areospace engineers). Recruiters look at grades and activities. If all you have to show for yourself are perfect grades, it's entirely possible (and sometimes way too likely) that the only thing you're good at is getting good grades. Add in experience that you can prove yourself by talking about and suddenly grades matter a lot less – you still have to pass your classes and understand the material, but the experiences prove your competence in combination with the grade. Not everyone developing a product has to be an engineer, so if you want a lot more technicians, fine. But you still need a good portion of engineers with the full depth of knowledge. People who program don't necessarily understand this, because a lot of programming work is technician work that you can teach yourself. Not that it's impossible, but very few people self-teach partial differential equations, and it's not something you can just pick up via osmosis.
    - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
      Perhaps software engineering needs more engineering and less "stack-overflow technicians". Yet, the need to gain extensive knowledge does not require the traditional university-then-work model.
      - colechristensen 9y ago
        I could see 3-year degrees, but that's it. Having gone through an engineering program, the first two years were prerequisites which were entirely required before anything useful was learned starting in year three. And it wasn't just extensive knowledge gained, that was the least important part. It was learning how to think. There was quite a lot of mindset change. It just isn't feasible for many kinds of engineering to babysit high schoolers for 5 years before they become useful. (undergrad graduates aren't useful when they start either).
- jedc 9y ago
  Ditto; & well-said. A number of friends and colleagues from my solar car days (at the University of Michigan) are now working at SpaceX, Scaled Composites, etc.
- roamingryan 9y ago
  Similar story here. I didn't completely tank my GPA due to solar racing (Rose-Hulman, ASC2001) but it certainly didn't do it any favors. None of that mattered though as the practical engineering skills I gained far outshined anything academic on my resume.
  - onesun 9y ago
    Ha! I think I have a Rose rain jacket from ASC 2001. Was that the last year Rose competed? I forget. I raced Mizzou's SunTiger 4 in 2001, then became Mechanical lead and Project Co-manager for SunTiger 5 in 2003.
- seal6105 9y ago
  BS Mechanical Engineering here from big name school. I wish someone explained this to me in college. I realized my deficiency one day senior year when I let my car overheat and had no idea what to do. I left engineering as a result and came back to it 10 years later.
  - onesun 9y ago
    Some of my classmates in college all went to a city a couple of hours away for a weekend, in a not so new car, and the car quit them about half way there. Turns out a car full of "mechanical engineers" drove an hour on the interstate with the car in 3rd gear because the gear selector didn't quite make it to D. Cooked the engine and I think they ended up totaling the car. They were top students too. That definitely reaffirmed my belief that GPA is a poor indicator of a quality engineer.
    - sslayer 9y ago
      I think your deprecating comment should be directed at the engineer who designed the shifter.
      - onesun 9y ago
        But.... an hour with the car at redline? They joked about it for months afterward. I think even they wouldn't have placed the blame on the aging shifter.
    - gaius 9y ago
      There's an episode of the Big Bang Theory where all the fancy scientists mock the internal combustion engine for being primitive technology... But when their car breaks down, Penny has to come and help them out :-)
pacaro 9y ago
Historically this is a reversal. In the U.K. after WWII a lot of the people who had worked in aircraft engineering moved to working in Motorsport. This is usually given as one of the main reasons for the concentration of F1 teams in the U.K.
- matthewmcg 9y ago
  You see this in the application of aircraft construction materials and techniques to race cars from that period. The Lotus Type 25 F1 car for example was a stressed skin, riveted, aluminum semi-monocoque body. It's a thing of beauty and it was 3x stiffer than its predecessor's chassis at half the weight. http://www.grandprixhistory.org/images/lotus25c.jpg http://www.grandprixhistory.org/images/lotus25c.jpg
- gaius 9y ago
  Also, after NASA was de-funded in the 70s and 80s all the physicists went to Wall Street, and that is why algo trading became a thing...
joshu 9y ago
Hiring is definitely a big aspect for Self Racing Cars as well.
SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
My buddy did college race car competitions and then got a job at SpaceX right outta school. I can anecdotally attest to this.
- aisofteng 9y ago
  "Anecdotally" is redundant in that sentence.
franciscop 9y ago
"are finding talent in an unlikely place: a college race-car competition." I am sorry but are we to believe that people who build racing cars for fun on their spare time are more likely to be worse Engineers than those who don't? Because certainly that sounds like the perfect place for recruiting great Engineers. I am one of the creators of a huge (maybe the largest) Spanish Maker community https://makersupv.com/ https://makersupv.com/ and I would bet and highly recommend absolutely anyone who has been in any of the leading positions. We have won a worldwide NASA competition, best design for Hyperloop, made Robot competitions and a really long string of achievements and projects while developing people and managing skills. Meanwhile our average school mate can barely make an LED blink with Arduino, solve a small dispute in a team or just about any real world problems. I am actually surprised that only few companies are poaching them; I have come to realize in what a poor shape Spanish tech world is with this. I am pretty sure in the US with the same achievements all of them would get 10s of offers/week.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Yeah, FSAE is pretty hardcore when it comes to engineering extracurriculars. It goes without saying that they've been fertile recruiting grounds for auto companies since their inception, but I do know more than one person who has gone to work at Space-X recently with this on their resume.
walshemj 9y ago
Why is finding talent from mech and thromofuids students so odd of cause the college race cars arn't that fast so the aero side isn't as important.
- atroyn 9y ago
  Maybe the US cars. Our cars in Germany go fast enough that Aero certainly matters.
atroyn 9y ago
My team from TU Munich's self driving racecar (TUfast Driverless) are some of the best engineers I've worked with, including during my time in industry. This is no surprise to me, and the sooner tech companies start tapping this well off talent, the better of they'll be. For now only the auto makers have caught on, but it's a matter of time.

CMU buggy also has a good track record for being a way to get hired.

I was heavily involved in solar car racing during college, so much so that my grades suffered because of it. But for the most part that didn't matter. Most recruiters I spoke to ended up being much more interested in the stories I could tell about all the challenges we had as a team and the novel solutions we invented to overcome them. I knew that if I talked to a recruiter and they only focused on my GPA, then that was a good sign I didn't want to work there. After my first job, GPA became irrelevant. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing. Fifteen years later, I still count my teammates as some of my best friends.

jacquesm 9y ago
Which team was yours? I've been following the solar races quite intently, some of the work is amazing.
- onesun 9y ago
  I raced Mizzou's SunTiger 4 in 2001, then became Mechanical lead and Project Co-manager for SunTiger 5 in 2003. Mizzou's solar car team changed to a hydrogen car team for the eco-marathon competition after ASC 2005
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Cool I found a whole bunch of pictures: http://mizzou.orgsync.com/org/mizzouecoracing/Media_Press http://mizzou.orgsync.com/org/mizzouecoracing/Media_Press
isatty 9y ago
I'm heavily involved in one of the AUVSI's autonomous vehicle competitions where recruiters from SpaceX etc show up frequently. I'm a senior now and my grades have suffered as well. I wouldn't say it was purely because of the competition - but I've a similar experience to yours where recruiters love stories from the competition and about how we managed to achieve our goals. I've learnt a LOT of stuff that I wouldn't have managed to in class. Similar to you, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing.
- eloycoto 9y ago
  How envy I am! I'm working mentoring some students to get this projects. Local companies don't see any value on this, you can't imagine how frustrated I am sometimes.
  - colechristensen 9y ago
    What do they do and how could they be out-competed?
humanrebar 9y ago
This is partly why we should be more open to non traditional educations. I don't see why someone needs an entire four year degree to be able to contribute to these kinds of engineering problems. There are certainly "university level" subjects that need to be covered, but that could easily be taken as needed. Or in a more condensed form.
- colechristensen 9y ago
  I think you are quite wrong, at least in the narrow sense covered by SAE competition engineers (and areospace engineers). Recruiters look at grades and activities. If all you have to show for yourself are perfect grades, it's entirely possible (and sometimes way too likely) that the only thing you're good at is getting good grades. Add in experience that you can prove yourself by talking about and suddenly grades matter a lot less – you still have to pass your classes and understand the material, but the experiences prove your competence in combination with the grade. Not everyone developing a product has to be an engineer, so if you want a lot more technicians, fine. But you still need a good portion of engineers with the full depth of knowledge. People who program don't necessarily understand this, because a lot of programming work is technician work that you can teach yourself. Not that it's impossible, but very few people self-teach partial differential equations, and it's not something you can just pick up via osmosis.
  - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
    Perhaps software engineering needs more engineering and less "stack-overflow technicians". Yet, the need to gain extensive knowledge does not require the traditional university-then-work model.
    - colechristensen 9y ago
      I could see 3-year degrees, but that's it. Having gone through an engineering program, the first two years were prerequisites which were entirely required before anything useful was learned starting in year three. And it wasn't just extensive knowledge gained, that was the least important part. It was learning how to think. There was quite a lot of mindset change. It just isn't feasible for many kinds of engineering to babysit high schoolers for 5 years before they become useful. (undergrad graduates aren't useful when they start either).
jedc 9y ago
Ditto; & well-said. A number of friends and colleagues from my solar car days (at the University of Michigan) are now working at SpaceX, Scaled Composites, etc.
roamingryan 9y ago
Similar story here. I didn't completely tank my GPA due to solar racing (Rose-Hulman, ASC2001) but it certainly didn't do it any favors. None of that mattered though as the practical engineering skills I gained far outshined anything academic on my resume.
- onesun 9y ago
  Ha! I think I have a Rose rain jacket from ASC 2001. Was that the last year Rose competed? I forget. I raced Mizzou's SunTiger 4 in 2001, then became Mechanical lead and Project Co-manager for SunTiger 5 in 2003.
seal6105 9y ago
BS Mechanical Engineering here from big name school. I wish someone explained this to me in college. I realized my deficiency one day senior year when I let my car overheat and had no idea what to do. I left engineering as a result and came back to it 10 years later.
- onesun 9y ago
  Some of my classmates in college all went to a city a couple of hours away for a weekend, in a not so new car, and the car quit them about half way there. Turns out a car full of "mechanical engineers" drove an hour on the interstate with the car in 3rd gear because the gear selector didn't quite make it to D. Cooked the engine and I think they ended up totaling the car. They were top students too. That definitely reaffirmed my belief that GPA is a poor indicator of a quality engineer.
  - sslayer 9y ago
    I think your deprecating comment should be directed at the engineer who designed the shifter.
    - onesun 9y ago
      But.... an hour with the car at redline? They joked about it for months afterward. I think even they wouldn't have placed the blame on the aging shifter.
  - gaius 9y ago
    There's an episode of the Big Bang Theory where all the fancy scientists mock the internal combustion engine for being primitive technology... But when their car breaks down, Penny has to come and help them out :-)

pacaro 9y ago

Historically this is a reversal. In the U.K. after WWII a lot of the people who had worked in aircraft engineering moved to working in Motorsport. This is usually given as one of the main reasons for the concentration of F1 teams in the U.K.

matthewmcg 9y ago
You see this in the application of aircraft construction materials and techniques to race cars from that period. The Lotus Type 25 F1 car for example was a stressed skin, riveted, aluminum semi-monocoque body. It's a thing of beauty and it was 3x stiffer than its predecessor's chassis at half the weight. http://www.grandprixhistory.org/images/lotus25c.jpg http://www.grandprixhistory.org/images/lotus25c.jpg
gaius 9y ago
Also, after NASA was de-funded in the 70s and 80s all the physicists went to Wall Street, and that is why algo trading became a thing...

joshu 9y ago

Hiring is definitely a big aspect for Self Racing Cars as well.

SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago

My buddy did college race car competitions and then got a job at SpaceX right outta school. I can anecdotally attest to this.

aisofteng 9y ago
"Anecdotally" is redundant in that sentence.

franciscop 9y ago

"are finding talent in an unlikely place: a college race-car competition." I am sorry but are we to believe that people who build racing cars for fun on their spare time are more likely to be worse Engineers than those who don't? Because certainly that sounds like the perfect place for recruiting great Engineers. I am one of the creators of a huge (maybe the largest) Spanish Maker community https://makersupv.com/ https://makersupv.com/ and I would bet and highly recommend absolutely anyone who has been in any of the leading positions. We have won a worldwide NASA competition, best design for Hyperloop, made Robot competitions and a really long string of achievements and projects while developing people and managing skills. Meanwhile our average school mate can barely make an LED blink with Arduino, solve a small dispute in a team or just about any real world problems. I am actually surprised that only few companies are poaching them; I have come to realize in what a poor shape Spanish tech world is with this. I am pretty sure in the US with the same achievements all of them would get 10s of offers/week.

leggomylibro 9y ago
Yeah, FSAE is pretty hardcore when it comes to engineering extracurriculars. It goes without saying that they've been fertile recruiting grounds for auto companies since their inception, but I do know more than one person who has gone to work at Space-X recently with this on their resume.

walshemj 9y ago

Why is finding talent from mech and thromofuids students so odd of cause the college race cars arn't that fast so the aero side isn't as important.

atroyn 9y ago
Maybe the US cars. Our cars in Germany go fast enough that Aero certainly matters.

atroyn 9y ago

My team from TU Munich's self driving racecar (TUfast Driverless) are some of the best engineers I've worked with, including during my time in industry. This is no surprise to me, and the sooner tech companies start tapping this well off talent, the better of they'll be. For now only the auto makers have caught on, but it's a matter of time.