I’ve lived most of my life here in Utah Valley. I grew up hiking, hunting, fishing, and mountain biking all over the Wasatch Front. In my youth, I would always work on cars and our mountain bikes with my dad. He taught me, at a much younger age than most would, how to change the oil in our car and showed me all about how an engine works. I loved building and tinkering with things. I would often turn leftover cardboard boxes into things like planes or forts, and I think I broke our mountain bikes on more than one occasion, trying to adjust the brakes or gears or whatever I thought needed fixing at the time. My parents were always encouraging, though. They never seemed to get too frustrated with my curiosity. It’s because of them that I think I am where I am today.

As I got a little older, my interest in building and engineering only increased. My grandfather gave me some of his old snowmobiles, and that taught me a lot about engines because on several occasions, in order to keep them running, I had to rebuild them nearly from scratch. As I got into high school, I got involved with even more engineering and even competed in an automotive competition. I learned that I loved to build longboards, and one of my favorite teachers even let me skip regular assignments sometimes during his class so that I could work on my designs for them. Since then, I think I have built probably 35 or 40 longboards.

One specific experience that really set my desire in stone to go into engineering was when Utah State University (USU) took some students from my high school up to their campus to see their engineering program. When I saw their SAE Baja car project, I immediately fell in love. I thought it was the coolest thing, and I really wanted to work on one someday. When I started to look at universities that I might attend, a couple of them in Utah interested me, but UVU gave me a really awesome academic scholarship, so I decided to go here. I was extra stoked when I found out that UVU also had an SAE Baja project that I would get to work on. It was a dream come true!

The year I was to graduate with my associate’s degree in mechanical engineering, UVU announced that they would now have a bachelor’s degree in engineering. I still had a year left on my scholarship here, so I thought it was perfect. I would now be in the second graduating class for the school, and I would get to work even more on the Baja project.

To explain what an SAE Baja is, every year, SAE International holds a world-renowned competition between schools and organizations around the country to see who can build the best off-road car called a Baja. Companies from all over come to watch, and a lot of times, the automotive industry is revolutionized by students’ work. The task is to design a one-seat vehicle using a standard 10-horsepower engine from Briggs & Stratton that can make it across an outdoor obstacle course, usually in the deserts of Arizona. 

Once I got to UVU and started work on our Baja, I really got into it. I started to think of new ways that we could improve our design. I knew there were a few things that needed to be improved before we had a chance to win, though. One, in particular, was if we could make our car four-wheel drive, we could get through the obstacle course much easier. Last year, only a two-wheel-drive vehicle was necessary to compete in the competition, but four-wheel drive is going to be a requirement after next year. This is accomplished by using differentials. The automotive differential is a piece of hardware designed to allow the wheels on a kart to spin at different speeds so that if, for example, you go around a turn, all of your wheels can spin at their own pace and still keep the kart stable.

The only problem with a differential in an all-wheel-drive vehicle is that you need an extra one to keep all of the wheels steady while they are all given individual power to push the vehicle forward. Differentials are expensive, complex, and heavy, though. This is why many four-wheel vehicles today are more expensive and less fuel-efficient. When you increase the complexity of a vehicle, the durability goes down, but it sure makes off-roading a lot easier.

Thinking about this more and more, there was one night I woke up with an idea of how to overcome this obstacle. “What if we decrease the weight of the differential on the Baja?” I thought to myself. This started a long project that I am still working to figure out, but UVU has been a great help in my research. I even got the Board of Trustees Learning Grant to continue my research, and that has played a major role in helping me get this project to where it is today.

I am a senior this year, and UVU has given me more than the necessary tools I need to succeed. I also met my wife in the school’s engineering program. She is the smartest engineer that I know, and together we balance out each other’s weaknesses perfectly. She has even helped me on the steering mechanism for the SAE Baja project. We have been married a year now, and I can’t imagine my life without her.

My dream is to continue in automotive engineering. I would love to work in the recreational vehicle industry with things like snowmobiles, motorcycles, Ultra4 racing vehicles, or even boats. Tony Stark (Iron Man) is my favorite superhero — and if I could grow up to be like him and change the world with my own engineering and design company like he did in the Marvel universe, that would be the ultimate dream. To the incoming freshmen at UVU, I would say, just as Tony did, “When the enemy tells you you’re going to fail at something, do it anyway. Nothing is more frightening than never changing.” Go for it!