Connecting Liberal Arts and Engineering

Scott Hummel (L-R), Jeffers Director of Engineering, Stephen Zolnay ’15, Alex Neeb ’15, Brendan Boyd ’15, Kyle Brennan ’15, Mitch McNutt ’15, and Regan “RJ’ Smith ’15

“As we proved, multi-disciplinary brain power fuels success. It’s easy to arrive at consensus when everyone on a team has been trained to process information and problem-solve the same way. But throw in students with different majors, and everyone is forced to think beyond the conventional boundaries of their fields.”

—Mitch McNutt ’15, a double major in economics and math

“Instead of viewing the project as a purely technical challenge—as the other schools do and as we’d done in the past—we had students from engineering and economics, and together they developed a business plan. They determined that quick shifting is one of the biggest challenges to a potential customer, so they set out to build an integrated shifter and clutch. It worked incredibly well, and no other race team in the world had one.”

—Scott Hummel, Jeffers Director of the Engineering Division, was adviser to the team that won three first-place awards at the Formula SAE Collegiate Design Series at Michigan International Speedway last May