Comment by xyx0826 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyx0826 | Hacker News Reader

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I think college student teams strike a combo of time, talent and resource that would be surprisingly hard to come by in the larger “civilian world.” In college, you have a bunch of freshly educated, similarly minded people in one place with a whole bunch of free time to put towards one project, highly motivated because it’s both an extracurricular escape and a career prep achievement. And these teams are often financially supported by their school departments or fundraisers. If you fail, there are little if any consequences on your life. All these motivators improve the likelihood of making something truly impressive.

Sure, we can make an arrangement like this out of college. Call up your ex-rocket club teammates, who have all now graduated and making banks at rocket startups. Spend the Thanksgiving week grinding out the CAD, code and circuit boards then test everything out in a desert. But projects like this are a huge time investment and with work and family in the way, they can often be very difficult to coordinate and pull off.

Even if your rocket does end up shooting off and breaking a record, does it truly “beat them”? I find it a bit hard to compare a team of similarly educated college students to a group of adults, usually with relevant professional backgrounds. Maybe the closest we can get are YouTuber collabs. Sometimes I miss my days spent on my college team; it’s pretty hard for me to get an exciting, rewarding, comradely and occasionally traumatizing experience like that ever again.

> I think college student teams strike a combo of time, talent and resource that would be surprisingly hard to come by in the larger “civilian world.”

The flip-side of this that you have a bunch of very smart young people absolutely dripping with theory knowledge and close to zero relevant real world experience in anything applicable in this space. The ability of college university teams to make exceptionally bone headed f ups is very well known. I've mentored a couple of university rocket teams for over 5 years now and I can tell you it's often an exercise in 'unknown unknowns'.

USC RPL has been at this for almost 20 years now. Their main competitive advantage (besides in-house cf cased motors) is documentation and knowledge transfer. As I'm sure you can imagine there are probably no founding team members actively involved today. I was at Balls in 2013 (IIRC it was 13) when they launched their first Traveler rocket, which was their first space shot attempt. They didn't actually reach that goal until April 2019.

I used to be part of a very successful competitive robotics team. You'll be surprised at how many student teams have this one guy who has been doing his PhD forever/startup founder who spun off from your team and mentors it that exist in the more successful teams.

I've seen PhDs whove mastered the art of being in the same uni team. One of them I knew has followed the path from undergrad (4 years), masters (2 years), RA (2 years), Phd (7 years), Post-doc (2 years).

Another is a startup founder who started the team in undergrad, worked as an RA for 4 years, then spun-off his own company over the next 6 years.

For the most part its beneficial for the uni to retain such talent. Especially, cause they are better grounded than some of the professors who claim to be "experts".

Unless they turn faculty I kinda doubt it. Not to sully your robot team, but I expect many of these students to want to progress to bigger and better things in the commercial space launch sector which they can't do at USC. Also, money.

But I'll ask them now, and get a real answer.

Actually, they have a team bio on their site. They look quite young to me.

https://www.uscrpl.com/the-team

Founded in 2005. They probably have a very strong Knowledge transfer system and alumni network in place (useful for funding). This is something I can attest to when I go back to my college days.

> you have a bunch of very smart young people absolutely dripping with theory knowledge and close to zero relevant real world experience

For sure! And that’s perhaps the #1 reason these teams are so valuable: it’s an environment to get hands dirty in. If something sticks, that’s great and goes on the resume. If something awful happens, just walk away with a cool story assuming you didn’t blow up a school building or anything like that. Either way the experience and hopefully learnings stick with these young people like me for a long time.

>Their main competitive advantage

Their advantage is institutional buy in and resource allocation.

A collegiate team that has to piss a huge fraction of their man hours on overhead tasks and fundraising has no chance of success.

Isn't their main advantage that every student at USC is rich AF? It's one of the wealthiest student bodies in the land.

At schools like that a pretty decent amount of students are on partial or full rides from scholarship or financial aid fwiw.

Somewhat but it's still such a wealthy student body that if everyone in the photo was from a family worth millions that would not even be a very unlikely statistical anomaly.

Apparently at USC the proportion of people on some form of aid is over 2/3.

The biggest issue with college teams is that there is no institutional knowledge retention. Once they are done padding their resumes, they will move on. The next batch of club members will usually reinvent the wheel again. There is little incentive for good management and long term innovation beyond proving out one or two ideas that are immediately relevant to their academic research.

I think we can see that this isn’t true in this case. They are building on successful work from 2019’s record setting attempt, implying plenty of continuity. And these are undergrads so they are not generally doing heavy research. They are likely well advised.

Good advisor, yes. But knowledge retention is critical. They've been at it for nearly 20 years, not 5.

Great, that strengthens my point.

If a 21 century rocketry group takes 20 years to reach the Karman line, college students or not, they are the definition of incompetent. Maybe they should all get internships at the United Launch Alliance; good for lapping out of the gravy train and not much else.

Depends on the team. They also have the virtue of being able to get almost any alumni to talk to them.

Well, I would guess the knowledge is burned into the mind of the students?

They probably have all their documentation going back years on a usc google drive account.

This is so frustrating to me. I was involved in a cyber security club that just started in my university. Both complete incentive misalignment and lack of focus. In the first committee meeting I was excited and pitched a plan to go from "zero to one", setting up training curriculums, building talent pipelines (esp from year 1s) from the student populace to us, institutional knowledge retention to keep and grow knowledge, getting mentors/research links with professors etc. After drawing everything on a white board, I turned around to find a glassy eyed committee. Every single one said "nah, let's just meet every week and uh, talk about a ctf or something". The president looked around and agreed with them. Over the semester I realized the president was far more interested in going to events and introducing himself as president than actually having any impact. As I predicted at the start, the initial hype and momentum gave way to lethargy and indifference. Participation from both non members and members fell off a cliff.

not to mention you are way more motivated when your grades are tied to an outcome

I don't think they are doing this for a class?

That's not how motivation works usually, no.

Grades are good to push a large group of people, including many otherwise unmotivated ones, up to a minimum threshold.

But you don't achieve exceptional results from grades alone (and in fact, grades can be harmful when dealing with otherwise highly passionate people).

Heh, grades served as a good barometer for me to know how much effort I needed to put into the boring classes to pass them. My transcript is a nightmare, high 50s and low 60s in the "easy classes", high 90s in the hard/interesting classes. And then a bunch of really fun/challenging extracurricular stuff that used to get a line or two on my resume when I was a fresh grad.

Thank goodness that the only employer to have ever cared was one where many of my extracurricular friends already worked and vouched for me. The only other time my transcript has actually mattered was when I went back to grad school; my overall average was about 2% too low for the good funding and I had to spend a semester working a lot of hours at the undergrad homework help desk until my first semester MSc. grades came in and qualified me for a significantly better stipend with less hours spent on other people's homework.

I don't think RPL is tied to any sort of academic grades

Making it graded tends to F it up bigtime. You waste soooo much time doing overkill process for the sake of proving that you can to get the grade. CAD models will be made. Simulations will be run. Powerpoints will be made to convey the results. When in reality all you needed was one dude to spend two hours prototyping both so that they could be evaluated and the more viable path of development chosen.

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