My love for engineering started way before I knew what aerodynamics, mechanics or drag really meant. As a kid, I grew up with toy cars all around me. Whether it was Hot Wheels, Legos or RC cars, I would always find myself building a track, putting my own twist on the Lego and racing the cars around and around. As I grew older this love for cars grew into curiosity, asking myself and the people around me “Why is this one faster? Why is it shaped like this?”‍ ‍

Then 2021 came along, where the inaugural F1 Saudi Arabian GP happened in Jeddah, SA. Without hesitation I attended and jumped straight in my seat at the last turn. Seeing the power and pure speed up close was an experience words can’t describe. After the race my curiosity sparked once more, leading me to the pits. It was then that I realized how much engineering, precision and data goes into these multi-million dollar cars — an abundance of telemetry on the screens, fed by the 300 sensors on board. It took me by surprise: it isn’t just about speed, but about tuning, adjusting, and turning data and design into performance. That is what leads me to where I am today, studying Mechanical Engineering at Purdue Indianapolis, aspiring to turn my passions into a career.

Now looking back at my experiences, Wind tunnel testing taught me how to design an experiment and trust the data it gives back. Working in CAD and CFD taught me how much geometry drives behavior, and how much of design is iteration rather than inspiration. Packaging three motors inside a chassis and projecting their thermal loads taught me that most engineering problems are really constraint problems: space, heat, weight and time all pulling against each other at the same time. Those are mechanical engineering fundamentals, and they hold whether the system is a race car, a pump or a production line.