This story takes place in my freshman year. Fall semester 2016 and Spring 2017 at Rice University. In this multiple-blog post, I want to share some stories about REV, from my perspective.
My initial involvement:
Since Freshman year coming into college, I wanted to work for Tesla, the electric car company. I thought what they did was cool. I searched for an engineering club to join that could help me out with this. I found the Rice Electric Vehicle Team (REV). This was 2016. I went to their first meeting. They took us to see the car in Ryon. Things seemed strange. Cables snaking around everywhere in the trunk, and apparently, the brakes didn’t work. Turns out they had gone to competition the year before (2016 before I came to college), and it hadn’t gone great. The team wasn’t able to pass technical inspection, and most of the members had left this year.
Luckily, there was essentially two great juniors that returned to lead the team. These were class of 2018 Mechanical engineers Clark Zha and Damien Ng. These legends of REV worked their asses off to lead the REVival of REV.
My involvement at first was spotty and unsure. I think I came to a couple meetings, then left, and eventually came back.
Throughout the first fall of my freshman year, I really picked up interest for ELEC, because of all the applications it had. I would love to go and talk to professors in the department, and students in the ELEC major about what type of work they did and how the major actually was. They all said good things. I grew in love with the idea of building something. Wrapping up my freshman fall, I got really excited. Although I lacked any hands-on experience past an OEDK Arduino workshop, I was hungry to get my hands dirty and build something ELEC-related.
When’s competition?
Around this point, Clark and Damien announced we wouldn’t be participating in SEM 2017. This was due to some confusion about the registration requirements of the competition. Because of no competition, Damien and Clark said we could propose a project to do for REV (semi-formally by writing a “research proposal”), and get a team of people to work on it on the spring. Dying to build something, I saw this as the perfect opportunity to undergo my ELEC baptism.
Proposing PowerSense
I spent that winter break back home, riding my bike as much as possible, taking an online course on Circuits basics, and writing a research proposal. I was young, full of energy, and didn’t know anything about anything. I called this idea PowerSense. It was to build an electronic device that could measure instantaneous power being delivered to the car which we could then analyze after trial runs, to find more efficient ways to drive the car. In essence, it wasn’t a bad idea. I just had no idea how to implement it. And more importantly, I didn’t have a good sense of the priorities our team had (more on this later).
Pitching PowerSense
Back from winter break in Spring 2017, the first REV meeting would be where we pitched this idea to the rest of the team and determined if it would be adopted. I worked really hard building a powerpoint to show the entire team of this idea.
I actually still have this powerpoint and I made it public in case anyone is interested:
PowerSense research writeup (don’t expect anything technical, I was a freshman when I wrote this)
I searched for other freshmen Electrical Engineers. There isn’t even such a thing as a freshman ELEC community at Rice (it generally starts the sophomore year when ELECs take 241), but I still tried. I found a bunch of friends that told me they were ELECs, and invited them to come to this REV ELEC meeting, were these design projects would be pitched. I practiced my slideshows with random friends, my roommate, and a professor. Everyone probably thought I was a little crazy. Most people had left the team the year before. We weren’t even going to compete this year. But here I was, this naive freshman, having no idea what I was getting myself into. In hindsight, I guess I was just so excited at the idea of building an electric car. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
In total that first meeting of the semester was pretty large. Half of the people present were there for the first time and had just come because I had invited them.
I went up and talked about the project. I think the room was full of mechanical engineers with little formal ELEC knowledge, and a bunch of Freshmen electrical engineers with little formal ELEC knowledge. So although I didn’t really know what I was doing, I guess most people didn’t know that. I’m not sure how I was able to get the team to trust me to build this project, but somehow I was.
In the end, we were able to get a huge mass of people to say they were “interested” in joining the ELEC team of the car. They asked if they could still join without having any experience in ELEC. I smiled a bit because I didn’t have any experience in ELEC either.
In the next 2 months, and with the help of others, I would get pretty over my head with this project, with not having any real experience.
Read part 2 of this story here
