The 2024 MIT Motorsports Team with their electric race car at an Edgerton Center Showcase in April.
PHOTO: SARAH BASTILLE
One student sits in the driver’s seat, squeezed between steel tubes and a steering wheel that looks like a glorified Xbox controller, another hunches over a laptop, and another tinkers at a wall full of toolboxes. “We started designing this last July,” says Megan Gupta-She ’25, president of the MIT Motorsports Team. Students designed and welded the frame, cut carbon fiber panels, built batteries from scratch, and test-drove the finished vehicle, all during a single school year. “You’d never see a car company build something this quickly,” she observes. “It’s kind of crazy they let us do this.”
The team builds their vehicle inside a massive garage in MIT’s Building N51 on Massachusetts Avenue. It’s one of several student clubs that use the space, a controlled chaos of heavy machinery, workbenches, and computer stations, thick with the smell of auto grease. The garage is one of the campus facilities providing students with space for hands-on engineering under the auspices of the MIT Edgerton Center, an organization created to honor the legacy of pioneering MIT professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton. “We are strong believers in experiential learning—as was Doc,” says Professor J. Kim Vandiver SM ’69, PhD ’75, who founded and still directs the Edgerton Center. “When students try something on their own and fail and fail again but then succeed, it’s a huge confidence builder for them.”
Learning without noticing
As a graduate student at MIT, Vandiver was Edgerton’s teaching assistant before joining the faculty as a professor of ocean engineering in 1975. He maintained a close relationship with Edgerton until he died in 1990, with a front-row seat to Doc’s creative approach to education and warm rapport with students and colleagues. Known for his pioneering freeze-frame photos of subjects ranging from a milk droplet to a bullet bursting through an apple, Edgerton continued to innovate throughout his life with new technology for underwater photography and sonar.
His philosophy of teaching was hands-on, encapsulated by his famous quote about students: “The trick to education is to not let them know they are learning something until it is too late.”
Starting in 1992, Vandiver turned a lab in Building 4, known as Strobe Alley, into an Edgerton-inspired center of learning-by-doing, funded for the first 10 years by Doc’s wife, Esther, and then through an endowment established by the Edgerton family. Additional support from donors, many of whom knew Doc personally, has allowed the Edgerton Center to expand its support of student-inspired projects and K–12 programs.
Vandiver leads the way down a hallway lined with Edgerton’s iconic photographs to a makerspace used for K–12 education, home to a monthlong summer design workshop for high school students. “That’s the wall of failures,” he says, pointing to a wall of half-finished skateboards and electric guitars, all object lessons on the road to eventual success.
“It’s your space”
While the center teaches classes in the strobe photography that made Edgerton famous, the majority of the spaces it runs are free for students to use for any project, not just those specific to coursework, providing a valuable outlet from the pressure cooker of tests and lab assignments. “When you are doing something you are excited about, it gets your mind off the stuff that’s dragging you down,” says Vandiver. “When you combine that with the feeling of success when something you’ve been working on finally works out, there is nothing like it to improve your mental well-being.”
Nearby in the basement of Building 6C is a new electronics lab, a full-blown machine shop, and the so-called Metropolis makerspace, complete with laser cutters, sewing machines, and woodworking tools, which students can access after being trained by fellow student-mentors.
The garage at N51 opened more than a decade ago and is now home to the MIT Solar Car Team, Combat Robotics Club, and the Motorsports Team. In keeping with the Edgerton Center’s philosophy, however, the space is open to any student to use. “I give a lot of responsibility to students,” says MIT technical instructor Patrick McAtamney, who previously worked as a research machinist on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and space shuttle radar systems. “I always tell them, ‘it’s your space, I just watch over it to make sure nobody gets hurt.’”
Forming lifelong bonds while excelling
MIT Motorsports has had its share of victories in annual race car competitions over the years, but its team members are just as well-known for their sportsmanship and collaborative spirit. “I’ve seen students leave their own paddock to help another team with a battery or mechanical issue,” says McAtamney. “MIT just breeds these students that want to help other people.”
After the Covid-19 pandemic paused the club’s in-person operations for more than a year, the Motorsports Team had to recreate itself from scratch and is thriving despite having to restart with students who were new to designing and building cars. In the spring of 2024, MIT’s team put in an exceptional showing at the Formula Hybrid Competition, founded and run annually by the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College, winning second in acceleration and first in design.
It’s no surprise that top vehicle companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, Ford, and GM, are eager to recruit Motorsports and Solar Car grads, according to Vandiver. “These are some of the very best engineers at MIT,” he says. “They’ve had these real-life experiences and learned how to manage a project from beginning to end.”
For students, the experience is as much about camaraderie as career opportunities. Team captain Gupta-She recalls one first-year student from a small-town high school who was completely overwhelmed by the rigor of MIT when he arrived. “He said one of the things that got him through first semester was Motorsports, and working with a supportive group of people towards something tangible that you could see.”
Gupta-She lives with two friends she met through the club, and recently visited club alumni who still live together in Silicon Valley. “You can’t do a project like this without being really good friends and supporting each other,” says Gupta-She. “Working towards something bigger than ourselves is a big part of our motivation.”
Give now: Support the Edgerton Center