All-Terrain Vehicle for SAE BAJA

SAE BAJA gives student teams a rulebook and a year, and asks them to design, build and race an off-road buggy. I joined the team of 25 students at my university.

I started by learning the basics of how a vehicle is put together, and then chose the vehicle dynamics team, because suspension was what interested me. I was eager to learn how to design the geometry and calibrate the system for an ATV. Most of it was self taught, with guidance from my seniors and professors. I learned SolidWorks, and ran the analysis in Lotus Shark to iterate on the design, making assumptions where I had to and working in parallel with the other departments, since every one of them depended on the others.

The bigger thing I took away was not suspension. It was building a whole vehicle alongside 25 other people: agreeing where my subsystem ended and someone else's began, hitting deadlines other people were waiting on, and the decision making itself, where compromises had to be weighed against competing reasons and then stood behind once made. It is the closest thing to real engineering delivery I had done at that point.