This article is part of a larger project by The Michigan Daily News section’s Campus Life beat. Reporters spent time observing and interviewing students from various academic programs at the University of Michigan to share what their daily lives and academic experiences are like. Read the other stories here.
In a remote corner of the University of Michigan’s North Campus sits a large, gray, compact building. This building is the Gorguze Family Laboratory, which houses the Wilson Student Team Project Center, a 20,000 square-foot workshop holding nearly 30 U-M Engineering project teams’ work spaces. The project teams are primarily made up of Engineering students who dedicate hours of their week to the Wilson Center, working on complex engineering projects with the ultimate goal of their team succeeding in international competitions.
MRacing: Chloe Acosta
Engineering junior Chloe Acosta serves as the technical director of MRacing, the University’s Formula SAE racing team. As technical director, she oversees all the engineering of the car, including technical development, design, manufacturing and testing.
In an interview with The Daily, Acosta said she is at the Wilson Center every day from 4 p.m. to — at the earliest — 12 a.m. and is taking a lighter course load this semester to dedicate more time towards her role on MRacing.
“Second semester, we move into the manufacturing season, so (I went with) a lighter workload because I could still graduate in eight semesters while doing a half-semester,” Acosta said. “I was like, no better time to do it than now, given my other workload.”
Acosta is currently taking two classes: ME 395: Laboratory I and ME 360: Modeling, Analysis and Control of Dynamic Systems. She said these two classes are the courses she has enjoyed the most.
“I’ve definitely enjoyed the two current classes I’m taking,” Acosta said. “ME 395 is lab-based, so I like it because doing the labs and actually applying what you’re learning is nice. (ME) 360 has probably one of my favorite sit-down lectures just because the controls aspect is interesting to me.”
MRacing builds an electric car throughout the entire year. During the fall semester, the team works on the design, and during the winter semester they focus on the manufacturing. The team starts the design cycle in late June and starts testing the car in March to make sure it fits within competition requirements. The official competition, the Formula SAE Electric, takes place in mid-June. In 2022, the Michigan team achieved the title of No. 1 in the U.S., but in 2023, the team was not able to compete because they did not pass the brake test, part of the inspection process the competition uses to determine what teams can actually drive in the competition.
During 2023 Formula SAE Electric, prior to performing the brake test, the car had to go through rain tech, which Acosta calls a critical test, to ensure the electric vehicle was waterproof. Despite this test, Acosta said the team faced unexpected issues during the competition.
“We were confident that because rain testing went well, the rain test at competition would go well,” Acosta said. “However, they’re very different conditions. Having a driver in the car moving around is not going to allow as much water to accumulate in the car as the car sitting without a driver, not moving under basically a sprinkler. We had water flooding at the bottom of the car, and then the accumulator wasn’t sealed as much as it normally was, so water got into our battery pack. We had to take our entire battery pack apart at competition, dry it all out, put it back together and do the test again.”
Acosta said the hardest part about being an Engineering student on a project team is managing her time between school and her projects.
“I think especially us on the project teams, we love what we do,” Acosta said. “We’re all volunteers; no one’s forcing us to do it. Whereas class, you have to do it. It’s part of your degree. So what can often happen is because we love what we do so much, we’ll get carried away with it and forget about school.”
UM::Autonomy: Ben Bruick
Engineering sophomore Ben Bruick spends the majority of his day working as the president of UM::Autonomy while taking on a lighter load of courses. The project team builds a self-driving robotic boat that is tested on its performance in various tasks and obstacles. As president, Bruick focuses on project organization, timeline management, fundraising and technical presentations.
In an interview with The Daily, Bruick said the UM::Autonomy team differentiates itself from other project teams because they treat their responsibilities as more of a learning opportunity than a job. Bruick said they recognize that members are here to learn and have a good time, as subteams get to choose their meeting times and many tasks are self-driven.
“We definitely want to keep it healthy,” Bruick said. “We want it to be a good opportunity for people to come and learn. We don’t want it to feel like work, so we don’t hold members to a specific number. That’s something some teams do that we don’t.”
UM::Autonomy competes in the annual international RoboBoat competition organized by RoboNation in Sarasota, Fla. This year, the competition took place in mid-February, and the team placed first in the U.S. and fourth overall.
Bruick, who lives 15 minutes from the Wilson Center, said his schedule typically follows a regular routine on a day-to-day basis.
“I usually wake up at 11:30 in the morning and get ready to go to my 12 o’clock class in the Dow building, EECS 215,” Bruick said. “Right after that, I go to the EECS building for ROB 204. It explores how to think about the people aspect of building robotics. After that, I have a three-hour EECS 215 lab. After that, I go to the (Safety and Facility Efficiency) meeting at the Wilson Center that one of the leads for each project team has to come to. I come home at 8 p.m., and I host the officers meeting for UM::Autonomy.”
The College of Engineering houses 18 undergraduate majors. Bruick said academic and social groups in engineering within smaller majors are close-knit and collaborative, whereas larger majors such as computer science have a more competitive nature. Bruick said he came into college thinking he would pursue computer science but quickly made the switch to robotics, one of the University’s newest majors, partially due to the competitiveness of computer science.
“You have the climate and space groups, that is a very small program,” Bruick said. “Computer science, you have thousands of people. It’s hard to meet people, and it’s hard to ask for help. That’s one of the reasons why I was not interested in doing it — I just felt like I had to compete with people. ‘Oh you got a 30 on that exam, I got a 40.’ I’m not ready to hear all of that.”
Bruick said the project teams are very accepting of all who are interested in joining and that this is unique to Michigan Engineering, especially compared to other universities.
“Our school culture here at Michigan is a little bit different than some other schools,” Bruick said. “I have some friends at Cornell and MIT, and to get into project teams there, you have to have experience, do interviews, submit applications. Here it’s like ‘Come on freshmen,’ because we want freshmen to join our team and to get these experiences. That helped me greatly, no barrier to entry here.”
M-Fly: Daniel Efunwa
Engineering senior Daniel Efunwa is approaching graduation, and reflecting back on his time at the University, said one of his most exciting Engineering opportunities has been his role of team captain for M-Fly, the University’s aerospace student project team that designs, builds and flies radio-controlled and autonomous aircraft. The team competes in the SAE Advanced Class, SAE Regular Class and the Student Unmanned Aerial Systems competition, which is also organized by RoboNation. Efunwa oversees the administrative and technical aspects of the team, working closely with the team’s chief engineers and two vice presidents to manage more than 100 members.
Like other leaders of large project teams, Efunwa spends a lot of his time in the Wilson Center. In an interview with Daily, Efunwa said he has a nonstop daily schedule that includes around six hours in the Wilson Center.
“I wake up early and depending on the day, I’ll wake up earlier and go to the gym,” Efunwa said. “I’m Christian, so I try to do my devotional, and after that, I just go to class. And then I’m a peer advisor for the Engineering Advising Center, so I have times on the (drop-in advising) queue. Then around 5 p.m. consistently every day, I’m at the Wilson Center. … It’s typically five to eleven and then I go home. From there, it’s just homework until I make enough progress that I can allow myself to go to sleep.”
Efunwa is taking 12 credits this semester, which he said he considers a light load. He is currently taking Aerospace Engineering Laboratory II, Linear Spaces and Matrix Theory, Aerospace Engineering Seminar and Topics in Black World Studies. When it comes to balancing his time and responsibilities, Efunwa said he rarely feels stressed but he wishes he had more free time.
“The classes are mostly fine,” Efunwa said. “This is definitely the easiest workload I’ve taken in college. I think the only thing I’d like more time for is cooking, mostly because of my bank account aspect. I like to save money and generally be better with my money. I’d say that’s the only thing I’d change, but otherwise, I’m doing school, and most of my friends are in other (organizations) that I’m part of. I get to spend time with friends through these meetings. I would say balancing everything has been pretty decent for me.”
Last year, Efunwa served as autonomous chief engineer and aimed to qualify for the SUAS competition. Efunwa said his most significant loss on M-Fly was when his team did not qualify for SUAS because of internal issues.
“That was the most significant loss for me — when I had to tell my leads that after all the work we put in for a year, we would not be able to qualify for the competition,” Efunwa said. “It didn’t just suck because we didn’t go, but it sucked because we got so close.”
Efunwa said the biggest challenge of being an engineering student is the difficulty of the problems they face when confronting challenges that could make a large impact.
“We could very easily as a team, just go straight wing, box fuselage, conventional tail, throw the biggest propeller and motor on there as possible, change one or two things, and that will probably work every single time,” Efunwa said. “We could just do that and say, ‘Okay, great! We designed an aircraft, we went to competition and we came 10th place.’ Maybe all engineers could do that … but I think the improvements we can make around the world require us to pursue things on the cutting edge, which requires a level of difficulty, and sometimes the problems are just really freaking hard.”
Daily Staff Reporter Christina Zhang can be reached at zchristi@umich.edu.