I learned a lot while running the UC Davis HyperLoop team, and most of it is not particularly interesting to anybody other than myself. However I did learn one thing that I think may be worth sharing.
The HyperLoop competition was an annual competition run by SpaceX, where universities competed to see who could make the fastest pod. The race was held in a vacuum tube. Before I became president (I was a controls programmer), I attended the very last HyperLoop competition that SpaceX ever held. It was in 2019 before Elon unceremoniously stopped responding to all our requests for competition plans without officially canceling the competition, leaving us in a confusing limbo regarding how we should plan our year and design our pod, and decided that he had better things to do with his time, such as purchasing Twitter. The winners of that competition were the students at the Technical University of Munich.
When giving the award, Elon made a joke that it was ironic how the results of the race were presented in imperial units despite the fact that the best teams always used metric. I didn't think much of it at the time, but it was certainly true that it was always the non-American teams that won. I presumed that it had to do with the fact that for them, it was an international competition. If a team was going to ask for funding to participate in an international competition, they had better be pretty good. However, while that explained why there were so few bad international teams, it did not explain why all the international teams were so much better.
When I was team president during 2020 I was attending a virtual meeting for the Hard Tech Fund in an attempt to raise some money for the team. At the meeting were some past HyperLoop winners, such as students from Delft University and the Technical University of Munich. It was over zoom because this was during COVID.
Towards the end of the meeting a student from the Technical University of Munich politely asked (or at least, as politely as possible given the nature of the question) why American teams consistently lag behind their international counterparts in the HyperLoop competition.
I brought up funding, and mentioned that the Technical University of Munich has a yearly budget of €500,000, while OneLoop's current budget sits at $2,400 (this may have changed for both teams, but these were the numbers in 2020). The student then asked the reasonable follow-up question: why couldn't we get more funding? Sure, some of their funding comes from their governments and universities, but a lot of it was raised by the students themselves. I mentioned that we only had eight students on the business team, and he replied that their team had even fewer members and that with eight members, we should have raised at least a million dollars! I felt a little bad about this because I was running the team.
A few minutes later, though, I realized what the problem is. The same student from TUM (I genuinely wish I remembered his name, he was very nice) asked what was probably the most enlightening question of the meeting which was how many of our members were working on the team full-time, and how many were part-time.
I didn't need to answer this because the founder of the Hard Tech Fund (who used to work at OneLoop and went to UC Davis) told him that he could answer on behalf of all American teams. We were all working on this in our free time. We had a full load of classes, and based on his question, presumably, this was not the case at other universities. According to the TUM student, at most international universities, students can take an entire semester off to focus on HyperLoop, or at the very least, reduce their course load significantly.
Interestingly, he then asked if this was due to students being unwilling to stay in school longer than absolutely neccecary due to how expensive our schools were, since TUM students would have to stay extra semesters to complete their course load. We mentioned that there were other factors such as certain requried classes only being available once every so often, and just a general culture of not taking semesters off to work on school teams.
He seemed surprised about this and concluded that American universities weren’t really designed to let people embark on major extracurricular projects. He mentioned that he had spent time on an exchange program in US and felt that the course load was 'different' than what he was used to, but he did not describe how.
I am not a person who thinks that classes are useless and that on-the-job training is the only way to learn. Different people have different opinions on this topic but that is not the point of this post.
The point I'm trying to make is that in classes, there is a ceiling on how well you can do. You get an A, or maybe an A+ if the professor does that sort of thing. I know that some people have received research opportunities or job offers from the professor in classes where they excelled, but that has never worked out for me. Not for any fundamental reason, just because the professors who happened to teach my classes were not in fields I wanted to work in. I did have one professor (Professor Bishop) teaching one of my classes who did cybersecurity research and I spent a few months in his lab, but after some basic research into python vulnerabilities I decided that cybersecurity was not for me. In fact, it went the other way around — a professor I was working for offered me a seat in his graduate class! Unfortunately it was during COVID, so I don't know if I learned all that much.
When you are actually doing something in real life though, there is no ceiling. So, if you want to excel at something, usually doing it outside of class is the best way to do it and if you are attending a university that allows you to take a semester off to work on its HyperLoop team, you can go extremely far. I wish that this was more possible in universities in the states.