REA propels young people into “seemingly impossible” education and career pathways due to the well rounded learning they have received in our various programs and the complex levels of design and engineering that are required.
REA alumni become soughtafter by Universities and hi-tech organisations. Here are a few examples…
Matt Cruickshank, a 20 year old F1inSchools graduate, was handpicked by the Chief Technical Officer of Red Bull Formula One Racing to join their aerodynamic develoment team. He says it was F1inSchools which gave him this opportunity. Matt began work in their aero’ team using wind tunnels and moved on to the computational fluid dynamic department to analyse air flow on super computers.
“Fundamentally this is the same as the work the students do in F1inSchools, but on a much bigger scale! I wouldn’t have got this far without F1inSchools.”
Another veteran of our F1inSchools program, Hamzah Brown from Melbourne, always aspired to work in aerospace (his screensaver during high school was an Airbus). In 2016 Airbus conducted a global recruiting campaign for a new member of their Paris-based design team which attracted more than 1000 applications. Hamzah was invited to France for an interview and he is now an Airbus employee.
Finn Galindo from Adelaide thought he was going to study engineering, like his father, but having become involved in F1inSchools and taken a team to the National Finals he began to re-evaluate his future. Inspired to help young people, he studied design and technology teaching and after graduating managed to return to his original high school.
“The F1 competition is so much more than engineering. It involves so many different disciplines. I have always been motivated by helping others. I mentored other students at lunch and recess periods while I was busy working on our car and folio. I like to coach people on how to do it. I want to change peoples’ lives.”
Michelle Lennon was a member of a World Championship-winning team and the confidence she received from this feat led her to an engineering degree at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Michelle’s thesis was feasibility analysis for an active roll damping system involving fluid dynamics, vehicle dynamics and electromagnetism. It came as no surprise when she announced that the global corporate Thales has signed her up for their above water ships division.
University student Roland Langford said REA taught him a lot about communication, collaboration, critical thinking, innovation, marketing, networking, mentoring, perseverance, scheduling, team building, 3D CAD/CAM, CNC lathing, 3D printing and the basics of computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, tracker point tracking software, high speed cameras and orthographic drawing. Part way through a Mechanical and Materials Engineering double-major, Robert is working on a thesis about ultra-high temperature ceramic composites.”
A group of humble high schoolers from Launceston in Tasmania stood in the garage of a Formula One team at the Singapore Formula One Grand Prix discussing breakthrough technology with its race engineers. Only it wasn’t the team’s technology they were talking about – it was their own. And, the engineers were very interested in it!
The Pentagliders as they called themselves had just won the 2011 F1inSchools World Finals and revealed their “secret weapon”. In conjunction with a research and development company in the US they had created a coating half as slippery as Teflon. They had covered their race wheels in the coating thus saving 1/1000 second on the track. That was enough to give them the world title and the speed record.
