What has been the greatest hurdles some our members have faced in their time with Formula Trinity? We are at the end of the day an independent engineering project, and we need to find the solutions to our own problems one way or the other. If we can’t fix something, we can’t use it; we need to learn, and use techniques to overcome the problems we face. We speak with some of our members about how they have faced up to challenges in their path, however this article comes with bad news; recruitment is now closed. We thank everyone who has applied for their enthusiasm and their quality, you have given us a very hard job in choosing between ye. Best of luck!
In Christmas of 2018, the suspension lead was returning to America, and I was suddenly responsible for a department that would need to start from scratch. I had half a Christmas to learn everything I could to take over as leader, and it took a long, hard review, working with my teammates, to get it back in step with the other departments. Justifying all of our decisions from one vision, we overcame a year of lost research to come second in the design competition.
I think the biggest challenge for me was transposing knowledge from my studies to building a racing car. The links between them were at first unintuitive, and almost felt insane to think about. Another thing I find very challenging is talking in front of large groups of people, and working with this team involved weekly meetings and team assembly presentations which really pushed me out of my comfort zone to do more. My duties at Formula Trinity to account for and justify my work within the team has built my strength at presentations.
My biggest challenge since joining has definitely been learning to design independently and use critical thinking. At Formula Trinity, you are given tasks and expected to use your own initiative and logical thinking to come up with solutions. Initially, as a first year, this was very challenging to me since being in school, if you don’t know an answer to a problem, it would be in a textbook. Here, I had to learn to develop my own solution to problems. At first this was new and challenging, but I now realise it has trained me to work analytically.
I think the biggest challenge for me is also the most common, and that is balancing Formula Trinity with my school work. It’s a constant challenge that you’re never going to beat, just get slightly better at each year. The better you can keep track of how you spend your time, the better you can understand how to use it more efficiently, and in trying to solve issues with planning here, I have picked up strategies to manage time spent on tasks more effectively. You will never get to an ideal, perfect stage, but you can definitely hone it to a fine edge.
Generally, in operations and business tasks aren’t made challenging because they’re technically tricky, but because they take a long time to complete due to there being a lot to process manually. However, the most difficult task has been making proposals to sponsors, keeping track of what they want and making sure the team can continue to get investment. It is never easy to write the perfect pitch for each individual potential investor, but it is important to ensure that we can continue to attract investment with novel and attractive propositions.
As team captain my biggest challenge would be getting the team’s first car on the race track for Silverstone 2021. This challenge encompasses hundreds of smaller tasks which must be tackled, ranging from achieving financial milestones to having a component ready for manufacture. I work with the Committee and Engineering leads to ensure that the project runs smoothly problems are identified early on. Yes, it’s a massive challenge to build a racing vehicle but with the right team and planning we will have one ready for 2021.
Honestly, just making it this far. We grew from just a small handful of people in a room, trying to figure out what a differential is, to 50+ members signing sponsorships with huge companies like BOSCH and reaching 2nd place in class at FSUK. Covid unfortunately pushed us back a few steps, but the team is still working incredibly hard to get the job done. Seeing Formula Trinity grow from an idea into a team that will continue to push the envelope for years and years to come has been an amazing experience
Motivating myself and others to get work done. Formula Trinity is volunteer run. Yet, sometimes you can be working 35 hours a week in college, 15 hours in your job and then have another 15 hours of work for the team. Although we all love Formula Trinity, it can wear you out. Keeping morale up is essential. Make the people around you happy, order them pizza and beer, whatever makes you smile. Split the workload, and work together. At the end of the day, while their success depends on you, your success depends on them.
