Dispatches from the racetrack

On how events such as Formula Bharat help students experience the real world applications of classroom lessons

The participants of Formula Student are definitely beyond the “student” category. Here, a multi-disciplinary team consisting of members from various streams: Mechanical, Computer Science, Electronics, etc. runs a small organization of its own.  Operating this small organization, with mentors in the form of Professors, senior students who have previously participated in Formula Student, and of course folks from the industry, is a great way for the students to experience the corporate world.  Students coming up with technical solutions, managing people, setting up timelines, working with budgets, and delivering the vehicle is a feat of its own.

A glimpse of the real world

We hear a lot of talk about students not being job ready after graduation. But a platform such as Formula Student is one way to equip students to convert their classroom lessons to practical application. The experience makes them more “real world” ready, and makes them more certain about what kind of jobs they actually enjoy. 

There is a clear differentiation that a student who has developed solutions and has proven them in such competitions brings, when compared to a student who has been confined to only a classroom/textbook context.  A lot of these solutions which the student develops would be from scratch, which would in turn help them better understand the practicality of translating an idea to a solution. And during our interactions with them we have the students asking us questions on how to solve a particular problem, build teams, solve motivation problems etc.  This indicates that they have already solved the basic problem and have moved to the next level. 

Learnings for a rewarding career

Students also immensely gain when they interact with peer teams, exchange ideas/concepts, and have a healthy competition amongst them.  There is the opportunity to fail, e.g. vehicle qualifying the next level or failing a critical test. Using that failure to learn and iterate is a great proving ground.

Technologies can change, products can go obsolete, but the fundamental lessons that students learn from participating in an event like FS2020 is about work ethics, ownership, and commitment to deliver as a team.

Looking at software as a distinct product

As part of FS, we had some great entries to be evaluated and recognized under the Software Category of awards.  Listening to them talk about software/hardware built for solving a particular problem, or achieving a feature, was absolutely interesting.  A mindset that would definitely help the students is to approach the software solution you develop as a product in itself. For example, the data acquisition systems some of the students built could be a product that sits on the Formula Vehicle, to be sold as a product to other teams.  This thinking will better tune the approach to developing and delivering a software product.

The data acquisition system seemed to figure on the list solutions which every team seemed to have. The software team focused more on acquisition and analyzing the data offline.

A value add would be if the software can also do “inference/interpretation” as the data is being generated, which would help the driver of the vehicle immediately take action for a better performance, for e.g. lap time.

And why is this product approach to software development important ? Software today is all pervasive and does a closed loop control of a lot of systems.  The number of iterations on hardware are fewer since they can be costly both in terms of time and money. Software, on the other hand, generally gets deployed faster but undergoes more iterations, which is both a curse and boon, sometimes software which is not yet ready can be pushed out causing a lot issues, but at the same time early deployment lets you get a lot of real time user feedback which can be incorporated to the next software release.  Any products of today or future will be differentiated not because of the hardware but the software which drives them.

So to all students, developers, and innovators: go out there to create great products and even greater software!