How the UIUC Department of Aerospace Engineering has Failed Its Students, and What it Can Do About It

The best way to learn how to do anything is through direct practice. By actually attempting to do the thing you are trying to learn how to do, you get to the core of what it is you need to learn about. Shots on goal. If you want to learn how to make films, then record. If you want to learn another language, then live in a place where it is spoken, and try to speak it every day (even poorly).

Engineering is no exception to this rule. If you want build great things, then you need to get practice actually building stuff, even if mediocre at first. To make an honest attempt, to fail, and to then try again is the essence of learning. It’s how SpaceX developed Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Merlin, Raptor, and now Starship: by testing in the environment where the technology will actually be deployed. When you go and try to do the thing, reality gives you nuanced (and sometimes explosive) feedback that tells you where you really need to be spending your efforts. You learn quickly, and accumulate little “baggage”—extra things you think you need to do, but don’t actually add value—along the way. Reality reduces your efforts to what is essential—something classrooms are not equipped to do.

Don’t get me wrong—classroom experience has its place: you are not going to learn Bernoulli’s equation through trial and error. The classroom is a great place to learn the fundamental physics that drive the system you are building. But as a wise mentor of mine once pointed out: there are no theoretical engineers. Engineering is about hardware. It’s about having an idea of a useful thing in your mind, and building it. And to learn how to do this, one must actually make at least one (realistically: multiple) earnest attempts to build something cool!

In most typical engineering schools, there are classes and extracurriculars. The extracurriculars, which typically revolve around a project, are supported by the university in terms of both mentorship and funding. They provide a valuable avenue for students to put what they have learned in their classes into context, allowing them to discover where the models they were taught break down, and to get direct practice doing things that will resemble what they could be doing after they graduate if they so choose. Common extracurriculars include Formula SAE, Solar Car, and in recent years due to the excitement surrounding the space industry, rocket teams.

For student teams to be successful, they need four things: 1) accountability for outcomes (including safety), 2) a place to work (and test), 3) money, and 4) the the expectation and the trust that they will recover from mistakes, emerging stronger than they were before. Without accountability, an honest attempt is unlikely to be made. Without money, materials cannot be bought. Without a place to work, they cannot be assembled. And without the correct attitude towards errors, failures become permanent. Learning from failure is at the core of engineering. Humanity got to where it is today by learning from thousands upon thousands of failures, many small, some tragic. We engineer, and UIUC is supposed to teach engineering, so that these failures will not be repeated.

When I evaluate the UIUC Aerospace Department against the four criteria mentioned above (accountability, workspace, funding, and attitude towards failure), they have only achieved a passing grade (a B-) in one of them: providing their teams with a space to work. They have given a space (with no machine tools allowed) for the rocketry clubs. Only aerospace majors have access, despite the clubs being multidisciplinary. To access the space that actually has the machine tools (e.g. lathes) necessary to build the hardware, a multi-semester bureaucratic application process must be undertaken for the club to be permitted.

On metrics (1), (3), and (4), the department has failed. It does not hold its student teams to a high standard. It does not fund them meaningfully. And, worst of all, judging by its actions, the department views shutting down projects (or deferring them until their members graduate) as the best way to minimize its liability, rather than helping the projects succeed.

Take a recent occurrence. Not too long ago, a club (not the one I started) at UIUC had a failure on a test stand that damaged some property. What was the university’s response? To shut down all testing that ALL clubs had planned (even if not using the same infrastructure). I’m all for moratoriums to allow an anomaly investigation to take place. But to prevent other clubs that had nothing to do with the failure from continuing to pursue their objectives is just silly, and in my view it is nothing more than a clever tactic the university has used to stop clubs from actually testing their systems, and thus mitigate the risk associated with the activity by preventing it from occurring at all.

The university fears that someone might get hurt, that property might get damaged, or that their reputation might be tarnished. These are all legitimate fears, but these fears cannot be put before the founding objective of the institution: to provide its pupils with a world class engineering education. These fears/liabilities can be addressed with engineered solutions: more fortified test bunkers, remote control, fire suppression systems, redundancy, and component-level testing are a few that come to mind.

Risk aversion is a void, not a value. In the face of intelligent risks, such as those required to provide the next generation with a quality engineering education, it is cowardice. The clubs at UIUC (and their members) are now being punished for trying to secure this education through real world experience. The right question is not “how can we prevent this from happening again?” but rather “what engineering action can we take to mitigate this risk in the future, and continue testing?” Trying to prevent young engineers from building things at best pushes them into the dark, where things are not done safely, or at worst, it pushes them out of engineering entirely.

The whole idea of college is that it is a safe, learning environment where the consequences of risks are not as extreme as they would be in the real world. You don’t want complacent people designing your bridges—society needs engineers who have experienced the pain of failure before, preferably without having caused the loss of life. An ideal college experience is one that exposes students to failure, not one that shields them from it.

If you are an administrator or faculty member reading this, here are the actions I suggest you take to make Grainger an actually good engineering school in the pure sense, and not just in terms of rankings:

1) Hold clubs accountable for meeting test objectives on a constrained timeline, and reward them monetarily for staying on schedule

2) Design and construct robust infrastructure that permits clubs to test safely without risking injury or damage to personal property, and do so quickly. It should not take more than two months to build a bunker if someone’s job depends on it.

3) Create standardized procedures/requirements that are easy for student teams to follow and guarantee personnel safety

4) Stop being an inhibitor, and instead pivot to looking for proactive ways to improve the safety and technical outcomes of engineering activities conducted by student teams on campus.

Other schools have done this, some unconsciously, to great effect. I would love to see UIUC do the same, but even better. If action is taken I am confident it will.

Yours Truly,

Ian Brown—a person who is building rockets