Graduates say participation has helped them land engineering positions
Scott Mingay has his dream job. The 2010 Rutgers graduate spends his days with high performance race cars – training mechanics, designing car safety components, and troubleshooting electronic systems.
He’s an engineer at the Skip Barber Racing School in Lakeville, Conn., a company that operates racing and driving schools nationwide. Mingay said he helped lay the foundation for his career by participating in Rutgers Formula Racing. Since 1989, RFR, a student club headquartered on the Busch Campus, has been a training ground for future engineers.
“It’s the single best thing I’ve ever decided to do at this point in my life,” Mingay said. “Every senior had not one but multiple job offers.”
Indeed, while Mingay served as president of the club during his senior year, prominent automakers like Ford, Chevrolet, and Tesla (a company that makes electric cars), contacted him regularly, asking about the club’s graduating seniors and seeking resumes, he said.
The group, open to all students, competes against other colleges from around the world by engineering, building, and ultimately racing an open cockpit formula style race car.
“It’s the best hands-on experience any student could ever get, no matter what their major is, because it’s real world,” says longtime club advisor Mark Sproul, a devout motorcycle racer and manager of engineering computing services at the Rutgers School of Engineering. “You’ve got to build the thing, you’ve got a deadline, and failure is not an option. It’s not about getting a grade. It’s about getting it done.”
The group project of the year is to build a formula race car, a low-to-the-ground, one-seat vehicle with open top.
The 2011 car is already in progress, says Alfonso Gonzalez, current president and an engineering student on the New Brunswick Campus, who heard about the program when visiting Rutgers as a high school student.
“It takes all year,” he said. “We’ve already started our design features for this year’s coming car, and we’ll finish building it in April.”
In May 2011, club members will take the car to a collegiate Formula competition in Michigan, and they will compete in another one in California. They will be judged by car industry professionals, many of whom are there to also recruit future employees. Indeed, students are all told to bring their resumes. The car is judged on its acceleration, handling, corning ability, and endurance. The car is also judged on design, cost, and presentation.
By the time the students get to their senior year, they know the mechanics and design and stress analysis,” Sproul said. “It’s not going in and regurgitating a formula out of a book. It’s applying math, making the design, and making it work.”
Club members aren’t all engineering students. The only requirement to join is that members must be undergraduate or graduate students.
"Students don’t need to know anything,” says Gonzalez. “We teach them what they need to know.”
Sproul says one past president, for example, was a political science major. Business students are being sought to help the group with its fundraising efforts. Currently, the club is supported by about two dozen organizations.
Over the summer, the club is taking its cars (most of the past years’ cars are still running) to local racing shows to generate interest and drum up funds to support the 2011 car project.