From left to right: Jonny, Aaron, Joel, and Laurence
I had the opportunity to spend the night with some of my friends working on a design challenge presented by Boeing. At the end of the night we took second out of the dozens of other teams that presented.
As part of the challenge my team had to manage the different complexities from a cost, viability, and design stand point to put a communications drone into the sky. We then had to present our case to an audience of a couple hundred people.
The first step for our team was to understand the problem. See the information we were given in the opening presentation here.
Once we were given the problem we needed to put it into a form where we could analyze different solutions in a different way. Check out the spreadsheet our team built to figure out the best solution here. — (Like actually its a really amazing spreadsheet)
Once we understood and could quantifiably define our problem. Our team divided and conquered our objectives by playing to our respective strengths. For example Laurence, an Astronautical engineer, knew the ideal shape of our structure to make it as aerodynamic as possible. Aaron was very knowledgeable about composite materials as a Chemistry and Applied Math major, so he worked on making sure the drone met the weight specifications using cutting edge composites. And with my experience in Electrical Engineering I worked on some of the communications payload with my friend Jonathan another CS student.
Now even though I’m not an electrical engineer, some of my hobby reading and past projects exposed me to error detection and correction coding, along with compression. It was the extra components I thought to add to our communications payload that made our system so unique and placed us on the podium.
The way we sold it to the judges - Boeing employees who worked on a similar project - was that we built a project that exceeded all the project specifications (Structural, Propulsion, Etc) and proposed a software update which incorporated compression coding that would increase the data throughput of the communications payload. This would allow our client, the Federal Government, to get a lot more use out of the communications drone for a little bit higher of a price. And this update would come at virtually no cost to Boeing as a company, since it could be deployed fairly easily.
Now while we didn’t win first (the team that did were all aerospace engineers) what we did learn was how to work together in a multi-disciplinary team. Almost none of the members of our team had any skills overlap - which meant that we had to take full ownership of the piece of the project we were assigned. Moreover the experience gave me a really in depth crash course of what it is to be a Product Manager working with different teams at a highly technical level to manage many different facets of a project.
Overall I loved the experience and thought it was a really interesting problem to solve!