Now working in the Aero Engineering team at Renault F1 as part of a 12 month internship, read on to understand the contributing factors to the team’s success last year and how her specific experiences have supported the start of her engineering career.
How were you involved with the Formula Student competition?
I’ve been involved with Formula Student since joining the Monash Motorsport team (Melbourne, Australia) in 2014. My first few years were spent as part of the suspension team, where my speciality was structural design, but also involved running the car at competition and testing and a lot of manufacturing work. During this time, I was also one of the Business Presentation speakers for the team. I took a year off in 2017 to do an internship with AVL in Austria before returning to the team in 2018 as Chief Operating Officer, managing a team of 100+ students in our second year competing with both an electric and combustion vehicle, and in the first year of development for our first ever driverless car.
Congratulations on Monash Motorsport’s win at last year’s competition! What were the key elements that contributed to your success?
Formula Student is as much a project management challenge as it is an engineering
challenge, and success can often come down to a team’s ability to effectively manage its resources, whether it be money, time or manpower. This was particularly important for the success of the team in the first years of the electric car. Decisions including shared chassis and aerodynamic parts between the two cars as well as simplified powertrain packages helped to align and reduce pressure on design and manufacturing requirements and gave us the ability to spend more time on tuning the cars and preparing our team members for competition.
The goal was what we call ‘concept utilisation’ as opposed to concept optimisation. This meant we prioritised an early build and extensive testing period at the expense of further design time. Although it may have been possible to further optimise the car design, if we were unable to fully utilise the vehicle concept’s full potential, whether due to vehicle unreliability, insufficient driver training, or lack of setup testing, this would ultimately result in less points scored at competition. With the earliest driving date in Monash history and a combined 2000kms of testing between the two cars before the start of our Europe campaign, we achieved our target utilisation of +90% at 6 out of 8 competitions over the course of 2018 and achieved the highest points total in the dynamic events at Formula Student UK.
In addition to this, our focus on data-driven decision making ensured that every part and change made to the car was justified and understood. This smart engineering approach showed in our fantastic statics results, where we achieved top 3 placings in design event with the combustion car and top 11 placings with the electric car at every competition, as well as strong finishes across the board in the other static events. Given the large portion of points allocated to statics this was crucial for competition success, and we ensured that we allocated dedicated time for statics practice in the lead up to competition including mock events with team alumni.
Our success as a team is a testament to the students who not just put in the time but were able to extract that performance out of the cars and out of themselves. Your people will always be your biggest asset and I was fortunate to work with a motivated and talented group of people.
What made you join the competition?
I had planned on studying chemical engineering at university, but after my first year I decided to study mechanical engineering instead as I found it more challenging. Having had no interest in anything mechanical whatsoever until that switch, I realised that I was on the back foot regarding my practical understanding of mechanical systems. Formula Student offered an opportunity to get hands on and become a better engineer – what better way to learn how a car works than to design and build one yourself? It also offered access to exciting industry and community networking opportunities that I hadn’t seen elsewhere so it was the perfect project to supplement my studies.
What was your biggest challenge during FS and how did you overcome it?
The biggest challenge from 2018 was managing the transformation of the team into “one team, three cars” whilst executing on our Europe campaign targets. Whilst there were a huge amount of resources going into Europe, we also had to manage the beginnings of a brand new technical section, autonomous, setting the preliminary design goals for the driverless car and figuring out how to structure its development in parallel with a vastly different timeline for the combustion and electric cars.
We approached this challenge from the top down, implementing new management positions and reaching out to academics in the university in the autonomous field to establish strong academic support for the technical direction and also the students. For the new autonomous section we targeted electrical and mechatronics thesis students to bring in new expertise to the team whilst also recruiting general undergraduate students to learn and carry over that knowledge into the future. Having this structure allowed the autonomous section to work over the Europe campaign period, using previous years vehicles to start testing whilst the other cars were overseas. We also used the Europe campaign to benefit the development of the driverless car, sending a number of autonomous section members over with the competition team to learn and get feedback from the European driverless teams.
Not only did our combustion and electric cars perform exceptionally well across the Europe campaign but our driverless car had its first fully autonomous drive at the start of May this year!
What's your current role and with which company?
Currently I am doing a 12-month internship with Renault F1 Team as part of the Aero Engineering group in the Aerodynamics department. My group deals with projects for the wind tunnel, for both the model design and tunnel infrastructure. The variety of projects we get is massive, each one is different and often involves new technologies so it’s quite an interesting group to be with. Although not part of my role, I also have a lot of exposure to the aerodynamic development work which has been really interesting to learn about.
Renault is a really great company and there’s a lot of opportunities to learn about the other parts of the team and help out in different areas, which is fantastic in an internship. I’ve also been given the opportunity to represent Renault at Dare To be Different events, which gives young girls a chance to experience engineering and motorsports first-hand and ultimately increase female involvement in motorsport and STEM, an issue I hold particularly close to my heart.
In general Formula 1 is a very exciting place to be and I always see or learn something cool every day, which I think is an awesome thing to have in your job. You meet so many intelligent and interesting people on a daily basis and it’s a great feeling to be a part of that team, working towards the same common goal. The only downside is that it makes watching the races much more stressful!
How did your experiences at Formula Student help prepare you for your first role?
In terms of directly applicable skills, my work as a suspension designer was obviously beneficial to my current role as I had a good competency in CAD and general design skills, as well as experience of making and justifying design decisions with considerations such as manufacturability and resources. I did use some of my FS design projects as examples in job interviews as I was able to provide a very detailed insight into my design process.
My leadership experiences in FS were also essential because my personal development took a big step up. The rate of increase of responsibility is very high in Formula Student and I do believe that it has accelerated my professional development having had those experiences, certainly more than if I hadn’t done FS or even only done it for a few years. Having experience in top level decision making, operations management, building relationships with key stakeholders etc has helped me become very multifaceted and gives me the opportunity to progress to new roles in my career.
What skills and knowledge do you see as essential for young engineers to succeed in their future careers?
In engineering, the most important thing is to understand why you are making some decision. You don’t have to have designed a part with crazy geometry using cool new additive manufacturing technology, it’s far better experience to have designed something using fundamental principles, proper consideration for things like resources, cost and time and then closing the loop by evaluating whether the targets for the part and its overall effect on the car were met.
Having industry work experience is also important, not just because of the skills you learn but because of your ability to understand and operate in a professional workplace. In my own experience, some of the biggest lessons I’ve taken from my internships have been regarding managing expectations, personal organisation and ownership of tasks as well as insights into different company cultures and political structures.
What advice would you give to young engineers seeking employment post-grad?
Formula Student is a fantastic environment for professional opportunities and the best place to meet prospective employers is in the static events. You get to speak directly to the engineers and they get to see your knowledge and skills first hand - it’s like a mock-interview. Whilst going around to the sponsor stands is still great to do, it’s much harder to stand out against the rest of the students who have gone through over the weekend.
In general, having a strong professional network is hugely beneficial when looking for a job. Rather than pure numbers, it’s important to develop relationships where people in industry know of your skills and character and may think of you when new positions become available or would be willing to advocate on your behalf when applying for a job. This can come through developing relationships with mentors or FS alumni, or reaching out to industry professionals and taking time to meet up, ask questions and demonstrate your enthusiasm in person.
That being said I haven’t actually graduated yet myself, so hopefully I’ll be able to follow my own advice in the near future!
What is your fondest moment of the competition?
Having been on the team for so long it’s hard to pick one. Holding the first proper part I designed in my hands and seeing it run (and not break!) on the car will always be a good memory, as will winning Business Presentation at FS Austria in 2016, which was the team’s first ever international event win.
More recently and arguably my proudest moment, was coming 1st and 3rd overall at Formula Student UK in 2018. For me this was such a personal moment and kind of validated the many years I’d spent with the team. For the team it was the culmination of years of work coming together to prove that we could succeed on the world stage and being at the helm of that was very special.
Please can you provide a recommendation for anyone thinking of taking part in the competition!
In short, my recommendation is to do it! For me, Formula Student was a turning point and set me off on the path I’m on now. Make sure you get involved in everything that interests you and push yourself to get as much as you can out of it, and you will only benefit from it.