As you might expect, most members of UMR’s national champion Solar Car Team are engineering students. Most, but not all.
Team president Stephanie Maiden, a senior in chemistry and biological sciences, started out on the team as a “peon" working small projects like sanding the car’s body. “I just did what I was told," she says, “but you know, that’s how you learn."
She soon moved on to bigger and better things, serving as vice president of race logistics. “I had to get us to the track, make sure we had lodging and meals while we were there, and then get us home safely."
Maiden is proud she took the leap into a team outside her field. “In school, you go to all of your classes and you do basically the same thing all the time," she explains. “I do chemistry all day long, so at night I like to do something a little different." That “something different" is being one of the only College of Arts and Sciences students on the Solar Car Team.
“You get to heckle the engineers a lot," Maiden says. But, all kidding aside, she says it has been a great experience. You don’t have to be an engineer, she says. “It just depends on how open you are to learning new things and how fast you learn those new things. I’ve done everything on the team that I possibly could have.
“Everything I know about engineering I learned from this team," Maiden says, and that’s saying a lot.
Maiden was one of the main designers of the chassis for Solar Miner V, UMR’s newest sun-powered racer. Solar Miner V will run this summer’s North American Solar Challenge, the longest, most difficult route yet, which takes racers from Austin, Texas, to Calgary, Ontario, Canada. Maiden is confident her team will be a success.
“We obviously want to win and we’re going to try our hardest to win – that’s just a given," Maiden says. “But if you get too cocky too early, you’ll have problems. We don’t want people to think that just because we’ve won two out of the last three races that we’re going to win again. You never know how other teams will use the latest technology to their advantage."
Maiden’s four years on the Solar Car Team have taught her valuable lessons in teamwork and leadership she can take with her when she leaves UMR to pursue a graduate degree in biomedicine. But the camaraderie of the team has been most important to Maiden. “My teammates are like my family here," she says.
Want to know more about the Solar Car Team?
In this KUMR feature, team members talk about Solar Miner V with host Wayne Huebner, UMR's vice provost for research.
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