Written by Jessica Petras, photos by Brenda Ahearn

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Step into the Wilson Student Team Project Center during the school year and you’ll find a scene of controlled chaos. Teams center on their assigned workspaces, spilling out into the aisles as their projects grow. There’s a sense of grittiness. Creation in progress.

On the surface, many of the teams don’t seem to have a lot in common. They all design and build very different projects, often for competitions against other teams across the nation or globe. The Mars Rover Team (MRover) creates a rover for space exploration; M-Fly builds planes; Supermileage produces a high-efficiency car; and the Concrete Canoe team builds…well, a canoe made of concrete. But for students on all of these teams, or any of the 26 other student organizations that use the Wilson Center, their time on the team often turns out to be one of their most formative experiences at Michigan Engineering.

Breaking out of your bubble

As president of MRover for the 2021-2022 school year, mechanical engineering undergraduate Rachel Li led a team of engineering and non-engineering students. Her exposure to different disciplines on MRover led her to pursue a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering after earning her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.

“As a mechanical engineer, you have to design your part of the project so it can be integrated and controlled with our electrical systems,” said Li. “You can’t have unreasonable expectations for what our software is capable of doing.”

The Concrete Canoe team makes an effort to include someone from the U-M Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design on each year’s team to help round out their skillset. For more than two years, art and design undergraduate Lily Gandhi has brought her design perspective to the team.

“Even if you’re an engineer, you’re not always going to be working just with engineers,” Gandhi said. “My teammates have learned how to work with someone who doesn’t have that engineering background, and how to explain things in a simple but direct way.”

Let’s make some mistakes

Being a member of a student team is a different experience than being in a classroom, where the focus is on learning the theory, or in an internship, where supervisors are there to make sure nothing goes wrong. On a team, students make mistakes. And that’s kind of the point.

“If you have an idea, you can bring it to life,” said Derek Johnson, Supermileage chief engineer and mechanical engineering undergraduate. “There’s not some expert over there going, ‘That’s dumb, that’s not going to work.’ Sometimes we end up wasting time, but at the end of the day, we learn something from everything we do.”

Most of the teams participate in at least one competition during the year, and of course it’s nice to win. MRover, in fact, placed first in the 2022 University Rover Challenge—their first-ever podium finish. But over and over again, the team members emphasize that winning isn’t the ultimate goal.

“More than anything, we want to make sure that our members learn throughout the process because that’s what we’re really here for,” said Elgan Wu, M-Fly advanced class chief engineer and aerospace engineering master’s student. “It’s OK if we don’t win that competition. That’s beside the point; it’s like the cherry on the top.”

It’s all about the people

It’s easy to forget that students volunteer their time to be on these project teams. What makes someone keep coming back year after year, to work late nights in the Wilson Center and fit in extra work outside their classes? The people.

Incoming MRover president and physics undergraduate Abby Feyrer said the team dynamic was what drew her to MRover as a first-year student. She hopes to continue traditions that Li established, like starting weekly general body meetings with a pancake brunch to help team members get to know each other as people.

“We don’t just want people to have a ‘professional’ relationship. We want it to be more of a friendship relationship,” Feyrer said.

The Supermileage team also made decisions that prioritized the team over competition success. They voted to pivot their team for the 2022-2023 school year by entering a new “Urban Concept” competition division, where they’ll start from scratch to build a vehicle unlike anything they’ve built before.

“We’re kind of back to square zero, but I think we all love it,” said Johnson. “It’s this place where it allows us to bond as engineers, but also friends.

Moving on

At the end of the year, projects wrap up. Canoes, rovers, planes and cars get stored away to be used for testing next year. There’s a bittersweet feeling in the Wilson Center. But what these teams have learned—technical skills, yes, but also collaboration, time management and leadership—stays with them and serves them in their future careers.

Reisner graduated in May 2022 and moved on to a job at Wacker Chemical, one of the sponsors of the Concrete Canoe team. Her biggest takeaway from her time on the team was her ability to work with others outside her field and learn a new subject.

“I’m a materials science and engineering person who didn’t know a ton about concrete but figured out how to find the balance of learning about it, doing my own research and also knowing when to rely on someone else’s expertise,” she said.

It’s not just the engineers who are getting relevant experience for their future careers. Gandhi is interested in working on the design of furniture and other consumer products after she graduates.

“I’m interested in the opportunity to work with other people who are not artists or designers—to bring my perspective and contribute to something greater,” she said. “I’ve really been able to put that into practice with the Concrete Canoe team. Spending the hours on it every week is so worth it.”