Engineering students hope downsizing means innovation

I'm the current head of design for the human-powered submarine team at Virginia Tech. We're trying to give to the team this year a half-scale testbed platform, which is basically not related directly to the sub, but it's like an R&D project. All the systems that our team members are creating, they are going to fit inside the hull form. And it's a huge materials processing challenge of trying to put together different materials and a composite structure that we think is going to be more of an effective hull form and more usable more accurate for the team. Hopefully, they'll get some use out of it. It will serve the next say five or six years of the club so that they can test components and ideas without waiting for the full sub to be completed so that means that allows the team to test all the way through the year rather than wait until they get the whole thing built and tested. I am the co-ballast lead for the IDC team. Essentially, we're working on an automated ballast system for our half-scale testbed. This is primarily going to be used as an electronics testbed. I've really enjoyed working on an engineering team like this. I think the IDC project that we're specifically working on is really allowing me to delve more into like validation testing, which I feel like I'm going to be doing a lot with my eventual career. The fact that you work on a team with other people that are not in your major, I mean I work with a bunch of ocean engineers and aero engineers as well, and we even have a bio-med engineer on our team, and he brings new perspectives that I would never have seen. I think it's a fantastic opportunity. It's really critical because almost nothing now is designed or tested or built from the expertise of one discipline alone. So, the fact that in interdisciplinary capstone especially, part of what I'm trying to enable students to do is to learn from other disciplines, to understand how other disciplines work. It's just so exciting to work on a project with a group of people who are just as passionate as you are. It pushes you to win.