We didn’t found the Liquid Rocket Initiative to build rockets. That has never been our primary objective—we are aiming for something far more impactful. Our mission is to create an environment that forges the world’s most talented aerospace engineers. Building rockets is cool, but we believe that creating great engineers is even cooler. By cultivating such a competent environment, we can equip ourselves to go out and tackle some of the most exciting challenges facing our species, such as the construction of a self-sustaining city on the surface of Mars.
To build great engineers, we must create an environment where developing engineering mastery is both easy and encouraged. The experience that the LRI provides must be immersive. Just as the best way to learn a new language is to travel to the country in which it is spoken, the best way to become a great aerospace engineer is to immerse yourself in an environment where people live and breathe aerospace engineering. The LRI should be a place where people can come and completely lose themselves in their projects.
Here are some of the ways the LRI’s mission has shaped the way the club is run:
1. Taking interdisciplinary projects from cradle to grave
As I mentioned in last week’s blog post, it is really important to own the results of your work. This means that each one of us does everything in our power to make our part of the project a success, even if that means we have to venture outside of our comfort zone to get the job done. Steve Jobs puts this quite succinctly, in reference to consulting:
“Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a fraction of the value, and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better…. You do get a broad cut at companies, but it is very thin. It is like a picture of a… banana! You might get a very accurate picture, but it is only two dimensional; and without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three dimensional.
So, you might have a lot of pictures on your walls. You can show it off to your friends… You can say, look! I have worked in bananas, I have worked in peaches, I have worked in grapes. But you never really tasted it.”
Adhering to a given title gives us only a two-dimensional view of things. For us to build ourselves into great engineers, each member’s experience must be three-dimensional, which means that we have to learn things that may not line up with our preconceived expectations of what this project would be. If we want this project to be a success, then it’s on each one of us to learn the skills necessary to make it happen. This is why it’s so important for us to learn how to raise money, to write, and to know what’s going on in the other subteams. Taking this project, and each of its components, from cradle to grave forces us to adopt a three-dimensional view of it. No one will raise money for us, no one will spell out our vision for us, and no one will help us integrate the different subsystems. It’s all on us: this means we have more responsibility for our results and it also means that we will learn a lot more than if someone were holding our hand through the entire process.
2. Running interviews
As far as I’m aware, we are one of the few organizations on this campus that has an interview process. We’ve gotten a lot of pushback on this, but running interviews gives us an opportunity to differentiate between the people who are seeking to create the image of engineering mastery, and the people who seek the real thing. We want our organization to be filled with people who want to cultivate engineering greatness, not the perception of such greatness on their resume.
Running interviews also gives us a fantastic opportunity to establish the baseline expectations for our new members. This benefits both the interviewer and the interviewee. By establishing clear expectations, we can consciously decide which social rules we ought to adhere to, rather than drifting into the path of least resistance.
3. Continuous Feedback
It’s important to subject our designs to as much criticism as possible. This will make us better engineers because it will force us to think through the risks in our designs more deeply, and it will give us the ability to think objectively about what we are building. It is difficult to build up an accurate representation of our project without outside input, especially if we haven’t attempted anything like this in the past.
Getting feedback on our designs also gives us the ability to interact with more of the rocketry community. What percentage of our time is spent talking to people who know more about this than us? By talking to the best in the business, we will integrate the group into the national rocketry community, moving us one step closer to creating a competent rocket engineering community right here at UIUC
4. Team workspace
Proximity is a catalyst for community. We are working on getting chairs, tables, and equipment (i.e. computers and electrical stuff) so that all of our meetings can be held in one place, most likely OPEL. If you would like to help us with this, please contact Shreya. We are aiming to have a workspace up and running by the beginning of the spring semester. Once we have our own space, we will have a physical embedding for the engineering environment that we seek to create. This will be happening in tandem with the development of our own manufacturing capability—more on that soon.
While creating such a rockstar student group is a cool objective, there are some risks that may get us if we aren’t careful. One side effect that may occur as we build up this student group is that we may instill feelings of impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome is the feeling of fear in response to being confronted by an individual (or group of individuals) who appears to be more knowledgeable than the person who feels like an imposter. Impostor syndrome is an insidious force in project teams because it makes people afraid to ask “dumb” questions out of fear of looking dumb. “Dumb” questions are necessary to expose stupidity in the design. To address this, we need to create safe spaces where everyone feels that they can voice their input. A sense of belonging goes a long way towards addressing impostor syndrome. I highly recommend checking out the 30-minute course on psychological safety that I have linked below.
Additionally, our goal is NOT to create an elite group for the sake of creating an elite group. So many successful student teams look down their nose at other groups. This kind of behavior does not help us become better human beings or better engineers. Elitism breeds envy, impostor syndrome, arrogance, and stagnation. Pride precedes the fall. We must always be learning, even from those who appear to know less than us.
This brings me to my last point: envy. When I was younger, I was frequently envious of those who were more capable than me. The mistake that I made was that I compared myself to them when I should have been learning from them. Each one of us must learn how to manage our envy. This will liberate us to ask deeper questions; questions that might expose our ignorance and set us on the path of knowledge. It will be impossible for us to create an environment of highly competent engineers if we spend our energy envying the best members of our community.
Further Reading
WATCH THIS! Best 30 minutes of your life. In this course, Amy Edmonson, a professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School explains the concept of psychological safety in depth. This is a key concept for anyone who wants to cultivate a healthy team culture.
See above :)
A book by Nassim Taleb about the value of having “skin in the game,” in other words, being accountable for one’s results.
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