A trip down memory lane. I’ve stayed in contact off and on with my senior project advisor, Dr. Sam Drake, over the years. I’d see him up at the U’s Mechanical Engineer Design Day every few years and I ran into him at a Native American ruin site in SW Colorado of all places. He stopped by the shop a few months back and updated me on the latest from the SAE Mini-Baja and Formula SAE team (now an EV) up at the U. I’d not been to Design Day in 3-4 years and I havn’t been back in the old Kennecott Building since the year after graduated and I was helping the 2007 team with their initial planning the summer/fall after I graduated.
He invited me to join a student meeting for the now Formula SAE Club, 15-20ppl strong and including students from many different fields. I was just a fly on the wall enjoying hearing about the twin-motor EV race car they are planning to design/build. I’ll likely drop-in a few times over the semester to see what they are up too. It’s some high-speed stuff compared to our old Briggs & Stratton powered Mini-Baja.
I’ve told this story many times but he’s literally the reason I’m still at Cruiser Outfitters and not in a cubicle somewhere. See, selling Land Cruiser parts was only supposed to get me through school. Like many, I was convinced I needed to enter the job field and get an entry level engineering job and put that degree to work. Dr. Drake convinced me otherwise. I spent a ton of time in his Advanced Manufacturing Lab in the bottom of the Kennecott Building, we met as a Baja team, that is where we built our car and often hung out to do homework or eat peanuts and watch cool machines work. He was up to speed on my rabid Cruiser passion and my then super small business. He didn’t hesitate to tell me
“we didn’t teach you to be an engineer, we taught you to be a problem solver, use that to grow your business”. That advice has served me well and made all the effort of school worth it imo.
