Engineering Exploration 3 (Organization meeting)
11/3
Joining the Auburn Formula SAE Club was really exciting for me. When I first went to the
interest meeting a while ago, I was surprised by how many people were there. The entire room
was filled and there were no seats left anywhere. But after a while , the number of people
actually sticking with it went down a lot. Now it’s a much smaller group of people, which I like
more because the people who stayed are the ones who actually want to work and get involved
in the car and have a passion for it. It makes everything feel more fun and more like an actual
engineering team instead of just a big crowd of random people.
One of the reasons I was really wanting to join Formula SAE is because I had already been in
an Electrathon club in high school. Electrathon is pretty comparable because we also built
electric race cars for efficiency and performance. I was the president of the team my senior year
and being a part of that team showed a lot about working in a team and solving problems on
the go. Having that experience made the transition to Formula SAE feel easier, but also more
exciting since the cars here are a lot more advanced and the projects are on a bigger scale.
Up till now I’ve been working on making a thing called a “Percy model,” which is a metal model
of a driver that we place in the car to check clearances and dimensions. I’ve been using CAD to
design all the cutouts and build the parts. It’s been fun learning the new CAD software which I'm
new to. It feels nice knowing that something I’m designing will actually be used during the car’s
build.
In all, SAE has made me even more excited about engineering. Even though fewer people
stayed after the first couple of meetings, the group feels like a good team. Combining what I
learned from Electrathon with projects like the Percy model has made the whole experience
really rewarding.