Guest: Ali Collier Returns

Teabags, pull up a seat and join me in welcoming Ali Collier back to my kitchen table!  A few of you reached out after Ali’s episode early in the year to let me know that you’d like to hear more about Mini Baja, a topic that came up randomly during our first episode.  Today, Ali obliges us and dives into the life lessons she learned from her time on RIT’s Mini Baja team. 

In addition to Mini Baja, Ali chats about the dawn of Pro/E and cell phones during her college years, the challenges of being a woman in STEM, how she probably shouldn’t go back to Brazil because of her fingerprints on the gun, the direct line from Mini Baja to her corporate job out of college, and her hopes that fucking Adam from the formula team matured.

Get cozy!

This week's small business spotlight is on Tiger Moth Mercantile.

Find Tiger Moth on Instagram: @tigermothmercantile

Order from Tiger Moth at www.tigermothmercantile.com

Intro riff by Dale Lytle (concert husband).

All content edited (I use that term very loosely) by Karen Shaak.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This week's at my kitchen table small business spotlight shines on Tiger Moth Mercantile. Tiger Moth Mercantile partners with over 30 local vendors to offer one-of-a-kind and specialty gifts that are perfect for celebrating everyday moments. From housewarming to holidays to just because Tiger Moth has curated the creative, the delicious, and the whimsical to delight your sensibilities. I highly recommend that my local listeners drop into their Carnegie, Pennsylvania store. The shop is an absolute wonder that flows from table to shelf and from room to room that simply encourages you to explore. Check out their upcoming events on the socials at Tiger Moth Mercantile or visit their website at www.tigremoth Mercantile.com to place an order or find magic at the moth. Teabags, pull up a seat and join me in welcoming Allie Collier back to my kitchen table. A few of you had reached out after Allie's first episode earlier this year to let me know that you'd like to hear more about Mini Baja, a topic that kind of came up randomly during our first episode. Today Allie obliges us and dives into the life lessons she learned from her time on RIT's Mini Baja team. In addition to Mini Baja, Allie chats about the dawn of Pro E and cell phones during her college years, the challenges of being a woman in STEM, how she probably shouldn't go back to Brazil because of her fingerprints on the gun, the direct line from Mini Baja to her corporate job out of college, and her hopes that fucking Adam from the formula team matured. Get cozy.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Oh, I have a lot. I have like two freezers at the store. Sure. So I could just like put it on a tray and put it in there for like 10 minutes. And like the metal right on the grates like really does a good job keeping everything cold. So I don't have to do too much as long as I have an empty tray in my freezer. Excellent. What I'm hearing is I need a commercial kitchen. Uh it does, it does help. It is hard for me to bake at home now. I'm like, my oven doesn't quite get hot, my refrigerator's not quite as cold, like just it doesn't hold full trays of anything because there's like food in it and stuff. Right. Because people live there. Because people, yeah, like other people. Yes. So yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Well, I'm very excited to have you back. And also thank you for the listener. We are sitting in a hotel room. So I am back in southern York County. Uh, had to make a trip here for family reasons, and Allie was kind enough to say, absolutely, I will come and record. So thank you very much for being here.

SPEAKER_02 2:34

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

And I have Allie back because we had a couple of listeners who had reached out and they were like, I would totally listen to Allie talk about mini Baja because it came up out of the blue. Like it wasn't even something we had talked about, I don't think, in like our in the background from our first conversation.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

That's not something I talk about a lot. No, but sometimes it's relevant.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Yeah. And so we thought, well, I could have you back on and we could talk Mini Baja because I think, and and I think this proved out in our conversation. There are probably a lot of life lessons that you take away from an experience like that, in addition to the fact that, again, for the for listeners who maybe just need a refresher, Allie's one of those people who like wants to learn how to do something and dives in and just fucking does it. It's like if I'm well, if I want to learn how to do this thing, then I'm just gonna start doing this thing. And we'll make mistakes along the way, and that's how we learn. And it's how you've worn just like a shit ton of hats in your lifetime. Sure. Yeah, that's what we do. Yep. Mini Baja was one of those things. And so we're gonna chat about that today. Um, but before we get started, for people who need a refresher, and also for any new listeners, would love it if you could just give yourself a little intro.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Sure. Uh my name is Allie Collier. I am the owner at Main Street Market in Glen Rock, which is a small grocery store or farmers market. And uh I have a new partner, Michael, who does Traveler Coffee Co. with me. And that's what I do. I do food and farming and take care of my son. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

If you have not listened to that episode, I implore you to go back and listen to it because that was a super fun one as well, um, where Allie does talk about sustainable farming and also talks about how she got to where she is because she was not born and raised in any way, shape, or form a farmer.

unknown 4:24

Nope.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

Or a shop owner. Nope. Yeah. Cool. So actually, one of the things that I want to start with, because I think it lays some foundation too, just to like sort of the type of person you are, is to talk about the market because you just finished a remodel where and you had some help with the remodel, but there were certain things that you did yourself that I was fascinated to learn about. Can you just like share a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_00 4:47

Sure. We uh recently had to close for two weeks. There were some subfloor issues, so we didn't want our freezer to fall through the floor. And my landlord had to come in and tear up parts of the floor and reinforce everything. Uh, and we got new flooring, so we had to move everything out, uninstall the store over a period of three or four days while we were still open, then reinstall the store. So, in addition to fixing the floor, he took out an extra room so that we could have more storefront space. So we relaid everything out, and at that point, then I was like, I'll build this countertop that we need to support our coffee, as well as the checkout counter and the drink fridge and things like that, and we'll really build it this time instead of just setting a counter on top of some IKEA shelves, which is what I had done the first couple of times I had to do it. And so I did get to build with, you know, some rudimentary carpentry skills. You say that, but this was how this was your how many counters have you built now? This is this is the third one. The third one. It moves the least. It is uh it is the most finished one that I've done. So um I do like it. I still am not nitpicking it apart too badly yet. So I think that we'll keep this one until I need to move it, and then we'll just have to take it all apart because it's heavy. Yes. So but where did you get your rudimentary carpentry skills? I just started building things. My dad built a lot of things when I was a kid, so he built a swing set with us and a big castle and all of that. And so we were helping as small children and played on that thing forever. And so, you know, whenever I had that, you know, base of like you can just you can just build it. So we just built some stuff. I went to uh in high school, I did a lot of theater, so I'm not a great singer and I'm not a great dancer, but if you tell me how to paint it or how to build it, uh I can do that now. And I build sets and I can build trucks and I can run flies if I need to, and all that stuff. And with enough practice, I can pretend I know how to sing and dance. So Well, that's acting. You're just pretending anyway, so it's fine. And they wouldn't let me wear my glasses because of the glare, so I I couldn't even see it. I hope I hope everybody enjoyed it. Uh, never got to see what it looked like.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

Allie is also the person who I was telling her um that I'm I'm like, I need to buy a sewing machine because I'm tired of having to buy new clothes like all the time. I'm in a situation right now where I have to buy new clothes all the time. And so I was like, Yeah, I think I'm just gonna start figuring out how to like take in my clothes. And Allie, Allie's response was Yeah, it can't be that hard to do it badly. It's not hard. Like and I took that to heart. I just bought a sewing machine. Oh, because of license. Thank you. Just like a little like $90 sewing machine, and I'm gonna start. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I was just gonna get rid of the clothes anyway. So it's like, well, if I fuck them up, then oh well, it's not a big deal.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

Take them in, let them out, fix them holes, use them for scratch, like anything. Yeah, yeah. You can you can do whatever you want with a sewing machine. There and like YouTube and all that, it's out there.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Yep. Yep. In fact, after we talked, I YouTube'd how to take in clothes for beginners. And oh my god, there is like a gold mine of YouTube information.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

Yeah, it's like people have been making clothes for centuries, millennia.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Right. I'm not the I'm definitely not the first to discover I could do this by myself.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

There's a lot of people who just would go out and buy something new, and we don't need that in this world right now, so that's great. Yeah, we need more skills, we need more people willing to do the work, and less people willing to go out and just throw money at it.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Rework. Reuse. We're well, I'm in my reuse phase now. Yeah, I think. Reuse, reduce, uh, recycle, all the stuff. All of it, yeah. So it's kind of with that whole mindset in mind that I want to go back and talk just briefly about how you end up a mechanical engineering major in college because I think that's sort of the where we start our story, right? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

Probably. I mean, that's how I got in theater. My parents were like, hey, you need to go get a hobby, go join a club, go do something. And I I I'm not a person with a five-year plan. So I like it when there's this is what other people do. You graduated from high school, you're gonna go to college now, right? Yep, that's me. I'll go do that. I don't have to make that decision. And in my high school, I grew up about 45 minutes from Rochester, and RIT was easy to get to. If you went to a college orientation or something like that, you got an excused absence for the day. So I went to RIT a lot. Uh, a friend of mine, we were gonna go be biochem majors together. I thought I knew what I was doing because uh again, I probably didn't put that much effort into it. Lauren was gonna be a biochem major, or maybe I'll go do that too. And then I sat through that orientation twice and I was like, I'm bored to tears. And you want me to do this for four years? I don't think I will. I think I'll go to all these other orientations and see how how other people are gonna go to college and I'll ended up in the engineering one, and they had this whole booklet of all these classes. Yeah. And I was like, Oh, they'll teach me how to do all of these things. I'm gonna go do that. And even though it was like very late in the year and had already been accepted, the engineering school is always happy to take, you know, another woman. Yeah. So I had decent enough grades, and they were like, Yep, you can go right ahead and join our engineering school. And they let me in right away as a mechanical engineering. I know they had some overflow and some extra kids that ended up with like undeclared majors, even though they knew they wanted to be mechanical engineers. But they were just like, you just stick it out until enough people drop out, and then you can join our program.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

So before we dive into how you got into Mini Baja, can you just provide a little bit of background on that for the teabags who may not know what it is?

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Mini Baja is a program through the Society of Automotive Engineering or Engineers, and that is a professional society, so they're trying to recruit college kids. Uh, they do two at the time that I knew of. They did two automotive uh race series that were limited. So Mini Baja was one of them where you would get a 10 horsepower Briggs and Stratton engine, and then you would have to build a car to a certain set of specifications, you know, there was in size constraints using certain materials, and then you would take it to perform in a series of tasks through three domestic races, east-west and midwest. Okay. Every year. So they they had cumulative points, but usually each race was also independent. And then eventually they did add on races in other countries, South Africa and Brazil. Okay. And I have not followed it in the last 20 years. I graduated and I was like, all right, I'm I'm done with this. We didn't. Yes, I've done that. We did it really well. I don't need to keep doing it. And which was the appeal to me again of engineering was that I could do that, I could do it as well as I wanted to, and then there were other opportunities to follow up with.

SPEAKER_01 11:42

Right. And so obviously, this is collegiate. Uh like how many colleges are participating in races like this typically, or at least at the time that you were doing it.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

At the time, uh, I think there would be a like a lot. They would have uh students from all over the country come. I I want to say 50 to 100, depending on uh the race, depending on how far away it was. Uh, I know that the East Race had a water course, so fewer teams would participate in that one because not only were there extra events, there were also extra pieces of equipment that you would have to build. So if you were not a college team that was dedicated, a dedicated team, but like a a senior design class or whatever, that's not really gonna be a feasible addition to those projects.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Right. Okay. So how does a person who prior to college was not into mechanics or racing get into Mini Baja in college?

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Um, well, uh, you just start taking difficult engineering classes with people who are into racing and are on the Mini Baja team. I'm not even really sure how I had two friends, uh Lee and Gabe, who were into it. I'm not sure how they got into it, but I ended up taking all my classes with them and they would spend all of their free time over there. So eventually I just started tagging along at the end of our classes or at the end of our study sessions. Yeah. Just to see what they were doing.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

So, and you had kind of an interesting job that made it so that you were in those class, like, or not made it so that, but because you were in those classes, you ended up with like sort of like this interesting side gig that I didn't know was a thing that one could do in college.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

I I didn't know either until Gabe was like, Hey, I need someone to be a note taker for me, and it's a paid position. And so I, you know, was already taking all of the classes with Gabe, and I just had to practice my penmanship a little bit. And the classes that I took with Gabe, I got paid to be in and take the notes, and then they got scanned in. And yeah, that was fabulous because note takers do better in classes, as it turns out, because you're really paying attention. You are, you're really and you have very good notes to reference when you're doing the homework and uh when you're studying for exams, and some of those classes were tough. So I did that for a few years. Uh, I think probably till we ended up splitting classes because I had decided I was gonna be in aerospace, you know, before you know what you're doing. And then I was like, uh, I'm obviously building race cars, maybe I'll switch to the automotive track. So for a couple of quarters, I had to take separate classes so that I could get back on the track that they were on and finagle some of that. And by then I don't think Gabe needed some note-takers, but we were still taking classes together as much as possible and studying together and doing homework together. Gets more complicated, you know, five years in do a five-year program, but sure. But we did as much together as we could, and we were teammates, and we still built the cars and all that.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

So I love the the sort of win-win out of the whole note-taking thing. I think that's why I was like, I cannot believe that this was a job. Like, I didn't had I known, yeah, that would have been an amazing thing because I'm a note-taker anyway, by by nature, and you do like I learn better by the repetition. And so when I heard that, I was like, oh my god, I could have gotten paid for that.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

I had no idea.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

Yeah, I could have gone and signed up for like other classes too, and like gone and like taken notes for other people. And I remember actually at one point I had injured myself at the shop. So for about a week I couldn't take the notes, so I had to go get a note taker to be the note-taker for our classes, and they're like, why? And I was like, look at my bandaged hand. They're like, I was like, I'm already, I can't, I can't do this. Um, and then when I could move my fingers again, those notes for a couple of weeks were pretty rough. But you know, sometimes you learn the hard way not to do some things in the shop, and I we learned lessons, definitely did not do that again.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

There you go. Well, that's good. So you did you had you learned a lesson. You didn't have to repeat it a bunch of times.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

I did it the hard way. My fingernails did grow back. We were fine.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

So you joined the team as a freshman. What? No, no, you did not.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Uh I I knew of the team as a freshman. I joined the team as a sophomore full-time. Okay. So I ended up moving in with some of the Baja guys. Like you're in the dorms and it costs a lot of money to live in the dorms. I still wanted to be on campus, and the Baja team ended up with a whole bunch of like unofficial Baja apartments, but they would pass it down to like the next person and the next person. So I ended up with roommates who were on the Baja team and going to going to classes with some of the other ones. So yeah. So I joined in my sophomore year. I joined officially in my sophomore year. Okay. I just fed them from my catering job in freshman year.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Nice. Yeah. And um, so as I'm thinking through that, just to kind of go back, because I think that this is an important detail. So you guys were a team. You have a team at your school, whereas other schools do offer sort of like senior design project, and like as I'm hearing you talk about passing apartments unofficially down to people, because you guys actually had a pro like a program. It wasn't school school sponsored, but not school like classes. Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

Yeah. So we had a home base, we had um like a mentor. Uh Tom was the guy who's in charge of our shop. So there were two actually race teams on campus in the engineering building. They did formula racing, and that was also an SAE-sponsored thing. They had different things where that was more focused on tuning the engine and making a lightweight car, and they had a whole separate thing, and that was for the the engineers. And then in the tech building, uh, they did the mini Baja team. Okay. So um there was a whole nother machine shop, and then we would go to a whole nother building and work with uh uh Tom, and he was you know a great machinist and a great mentor, and he would be like, All right, don't hurt yourselves while not here. That was when we did hurt ourselves, but most often we didn't tell Tom that if we could avoid it. Uh we didn't want to get him in trouble. Um, but we had access passes to the shop, and so we because we were there at all hours of the day designing and building. And yeah, so it was very much like more like uh you know, like the rugby team. And this is the rugby team and the Baja team had a lot of overlap uh for a little bit there. Interesting. We could probably do a whole study in that too. Um I think there was just like one guy who was on rugby and he hurt himself and so he had to join the Baja team. So, like our the apartment I moved into was half rugby, half Baja for a while, and then then they moved on. Um, they split up a little bit uh towards the end there, but it was yeah, it was it was fun.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Do you remember like what precipitated you joining the team? Like how so obviously you're note-taking. Is that how it came about? Like you just learned about it that way. Did you like intro yourself to other team members?

SPEAKER_00 18:48

I just would follow them there and like we would be doing homework there. And I remember some of my friends being like, you don't want to join this team, it's a little too hardcore. And I'm like, okay, now I'm joining. Well, now that you mention it. So uh I think I'm maybe gonna. Yeah. Uh, and then I'm gonna prove to you that I can do this. That's probably more what happened. Um gotcha. Yeah, they like some of my friends were overprotective. You know, I was obviously 18 in college. You you're a little naive. I was uh, you know, a pretty lady in an engineering school. So some of them did feel the need to be overprotective. Sure. That was not something I stand for. So I'm like, I can do that myself. Thank you. Yeah, and I think that was it. That's probably it. So I was probably told I wouldn't like it and I didn't want to do it. And I was like, ha ha.

SPEAKER_01 19:41

I'm about to show you.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Yeah, and I did like it and I could do it. So yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

And when you so your first year of like really sort of being a part of the team, you kind of said you weren't really doing build stuff.

SPEAKER_00 19:53

You were mostly doing like the math and like So we did some of the math. I did try and help some of the math. I did a lot of it is there's a lot to learn. Like there's a lot of machining involved, there's a lot of you know, actual assembly work. So um, I did do some of the building. I didn't do any of the design work that year. I was doing they would just be like, here's the part that you that needs to be made, or like, you know, drawings need to be made so that people know how to do it. So I was helping make some drawings and helping do some of that stuff. But this was all very early on in Pro Engineer, and so we were using it, and nobody really knew how to tell us how to use it. We're just kind of pushing buttons and and figuring it out as we're also trying to build a car and also trying to learn how to go to school and live on your own and all that fun stuff.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

So I'm gonna do a little sidebar here too for for my engineering nerds, and I say that because I am married to one. Talk a little bit about that. I'm gonna nerd out for a second because you were at the beginning of using Pro E. Yeah. And so what was being used prior to that?

SPEAKER_00 21:00

I know that RIT tried to use ideas first. They did teach us probably one quarter of we were on the quarter system, not semesters, of ideas, and like it was a very finicky program. They wanted to get into 3D drawing, um, and then they switched us to pro e. And I'm I'm not sure if I did pro e at Baja first or in a class. Yeah, it just was all kind of you know, it felt very hard and fast, and we're like, this is how you do it. And you know, we were very early on into pro-e, and then you know, the program got better and and we got better at the same time, and uh, you know, they're learning how to make drawings and you know, use the little the little box, Zelly with the parts and pull the part numbers and then making assemblies and then pull that into a drawing. And you know, I've I don't think outside of that one quarter of ideas that I've used anything that wasn't Pro E. So all the way through my career as an engineer, I used Pro E and it was. It was always just kind of fun. Be like they would switch the buttons, and then you'd be like, Oh, now you're back to the list, and then go back to the buttons. And I'd be like, and it was just something that it was like a language my brain knows how to use, yeah, just from the sheer exposure over 10-15 years. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

So yeah. I just love the fact that they're like there it also is representative of a moment in time where you know you definitely have people who bridge, you know, tech what's the word I'm looking for? Mostly technologies. I was kind of thinking technique, but technologies, and you kind of didn't have to start with what came before you were like I don't know how to design in 2D.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

I've never had to do it. They're still doing it. That's how my um husbands work, that's what they use uh uh is 2D design. And I'm like, okay, that's good for you, fine for you. I fine I can see it in 3D, that's how I learned how to do it, and that's probably the only way I'll ever have used it. Not gonna probably go back into engineering at this point, but it does seem like it's a little fetched at this point, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

Not maybe not far-fetched, but maybe a little fetched.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

A little fetched, yeah. It's a you know, it's a pipe dream to have someone else tell me what to do at a certain point and not have to think about it. But uh, it is also like I don't know if that didn't work out great the first time. I don't know how it'll work.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

And that feels like it feels like only the the saying you can never go back home. That feels a little bit like that in this case, too.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

Yeah, it's that's probable. But you know, uh coming from designing my own stuff and we built our own thing uh and used our, you know, followed the rules, but did what we wanted to do, and then having to go into an engineering job where there were clear hierarchies and people telling me what to do, even though it's very clear that that's not maybe the right way or the way that I would do it, or the best way. And just being like, uh, I had all this, all this freedom. Yeah. Like in school, you know, you had to do all of the schoolwork, I had to have a job, and then I also had a team where I was an integral part of it and I was doing it, and I was in charge of things, and you know, it was a small enough team, and it's not like anybody else was gonna do it. Right. Or if I didn't do it once I made the commitment, you know, it would it would impede what they were doing. Someone else could do it, and um, but this was my job for now, this is what I was doing. So then you had to go work on cotton pickers and be like, oh, okay. I guess I'll do it the way you guys say to do it for now. Right. And then but I also had more pro-e experience, so those guys were learning from the 2D to the 3D. It was very obvious that I had so much more pro-e experience than they did because I'd had four years of it. Right. And it was really only out for four years at that point in time. So I learned it, you know, as a baby and and was much more proficient at it.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

Well, and you're also learning it in in such a it's such a mixed environment, right? Because you're you have this technical environment, but the ability to be creative with it. So you're in a system and you're playing and learning it by the way.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

Yeah, I had like I had a classroom structure and lessons, and then I also was like, I'm over here doing it. Exactly. For real.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

They're also doing it in in their very like right. I don't want to this is how we always did it.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

Yeah, they didn't get a lot of training.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

Well, yeah, and now we just need to make it do what we were doing before, but in in this system, right, instead of like just and you're learning free how that's not how it works, that's not how 3D works.

SPEAKER_00 25:34

Like you can do so much more with it, and you're they were very limited with what they could do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

So when let's talk a little bit about some of the jobs on the Mini Baja team, because so okay, so you start out, there's a a shit ton to learn, and I know one of the things that you talked about was like you you weren't machining, um, at least initially.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

I wasn't good at it. I was never very good at it.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

But talk about the different jobs and then how throughout the course of your you know five years at RIT, how did you take on some of those other jobs?

SPEAKER_00 26:08

Uh I don't know. Those again, uh sometimes you just go, yeah, I can do that. And it's not a big, it's not a big decision at the time. It probably should be. I should probably think through some of the things before I agree to doing them. But um silly. That's silly. It is silly. I like to do it and then be like, oh, what have I got myself into? So um so the the Mini Baja team, the way it was structured, again, because it was a team and it was a student-run organization that was it did have, you know, team captains for frames and brakes and transmissions and engines, and and then we had folks that had been on the team so they would know how to do it. And then, you know, as like the at the end of my five years, I tried I stepped back, I wasn't the frame team lead. You know, Justin took over and and designed and built frames from there. He went on to have a great welding career, so that worked out really well for him. Right. Um so like I didn't just come in and like be like, I'm gonna be the frame team leader. Right. Like someone had done it, he was a teammate, so I could be like, This is what I'm thinking, this is what we're gonna try now. Um, I worked closely with him when I wasn't the frame team lead, so I did learn how to build the machine. I never did learn how to weld very well, but uh Milosh was a great welder too, so he did a lot of that for us. Um, but I did learn how to do the panels, I did learn about the spring in the materials that we were doing and how to how to kind of until it was welded together, uh, you know, hold it in place and um build jigs and all of that stuff, and then finish it out with the paints and the numbers and the and and like the dipping and like getting everything to a powder coating to get it all to look right and all finished together and to last really well. So um it was more than just that. So there was like I I came into it, this was the thing that I helped a lot with. This is you know, you hurt yourself making those little tabs, and you know, okay, don't do that. And then when you train the next person, you're like, don't do that. Like you don't, you listen to it when someone says it and you go, okay, and then you go, eh, and then and then don't do that for real. I'll tell you what happens.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

Um This is important institutional knowledge that we're passing down.

SPEAKER_00 28:25

So, you know, you learn, but you know, there someone had figured out how to how to clean a tube and how to bend a tube and how to cut the tubes, and you know, and then I was just they go, This is how you do it. This is your print, you're making this part, and then you go, Oh, okay, I did that, or oh shit, I picked that one up. Um so some of the parts were more difficult to make than others. Um, I was never good at the very detailed, very precise machining of the parts, but I was good at taking a 10-foot-long tube and making it bend the way you needed to, and the cuts and all of that, and they were they were the finicky ones. I'm making hand motions at you that you guys can't hear me, but those are like there was a lot of that, and then you'd be like, Oh, that one's too long, or that one's too big, or you had to get two that needed to like line up, and they were both wrong a little bit, but these were the two that were the closest mirrors, and like we can make that work, and that was what I ended up doing was the frame team lead. But um I did help with some of the transmission stuff. Like we did all learn how to try to take it apart, put it back together. We did all help when you know someone needed to just be running trials and make sure that they were you know dialing in, they were using ATV clutches and things like that. And I never did quite learn how to do the clutching, but I I could sit in the car and just run laps when they needed someone to run laps. So uh we did all someone was in charge of it, but we did all learn how to do a little bit of each of the things. Yeah. Um, because you know, we were teammates, we did what to do as well as we could for everybody else. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

And it is like ultimately the one of the best examples, like real life examples that I've heard of collaboration in a way, like because it m matters, like all of those things have to come together in order for you to be successful, like to even build a successful car, let alone have it go in a race.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

Let alone have it go in a race, and then do really well. And yeah, you know, so the team that was ahead of us, like they they had started this team, and uh for a few years they did well, but they didn't win anything. And uh, and I know that rankled some of them because you know, you start from then from scratch, it's it's hard to start from scratch and then be immediately good. Sure. And so they were immediately good, they just weren't immediately the best. Yeah, and they're like, okay, calm down. We don't nobody need to be the best, but um, you'd go to a race and realize that you know, I you do you do want to be the best. Like we have so many more resources than some of these other teams. Um, and so then it was important to us to not only do the best that we could for our teammates, but we wanted to do the best that we could because everybody else was trying just as hard as we were, right? And we had more resources while we were at a race, so we have a Penske truck full of every tool that was in our shop and several different engines, and some teams could only afford to even have bring one. Yeah. So if you've got a bunch of different engines and we not only knew, like we knew every single one of those engines, so we pick the best ones for us, but we can give it to you and tell you, hey, this is what it's gonna do. We know everything about this engine. That was not something that ever interested me. So I never knew everything about an engine, but I could put it into a frame for you. Yeah, I could mount that to your car, I can make sure that that ran. Um, and so we would just at a certain point be like, all right, we are ready to go. Everything that we need to do is done, and we would walk around and try and help other teams. Or, you know, sometimes, you know, the rules required someone to be with a car at all times. So if you don't have enough teammates on your team for everybody to be represented like where they need to be, and also move the car because someone had to walk next to the car. I just walk next to someone else's car. Who cares? That's an easy job. I can do that, you know.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

So you're not even just collaborating with your own team, like you're collaborating across, you know, just the events, curious.

SPEAKER_00 32:16

And a lot of that was handed down to us, like the teammates that started Mini Baja, they they did it, you know, we all did it because we loved it. We were all tired, we were all going to school. Yeah, some of us were working very hard, some of us were being paid to work at the shop. So not only did I have a job as a note taker, I did have a job at the shop. Did you? So when the shop needed to be open and someone just was sitting at the desk helping people, letting them know to do a lot of the Baja team had jobs at the shop. We were just being paid to be there. Yeah. And then sometimes we'd be working on homework and sometimes we'd be working on Baja stuff. That's fair. Sometimes you'd be helping other, you know, kids.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

And so that was like that was one of the things that early on, the early teammates really instilled on us is that you know, we we help, we help each other because we are on the same team, and then we help the other teams because you know generally we're all on the same team, we're all students, we're all doing this, we're all having feels like a life lesson in there too about something about when you have a lot of resources and other people don't.

SPEAKER_00 33:18

I know. It's it seems like we could be helping each other all of the time. We should noodle on that.

SPEAKER_01 33:24

We should noodle on that. It feels like it feels like there might be a there there, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So let's talk about how you got into the racing part itself. When what was what was the the event that precipitated you getting in the car?

SPEAKER_00 33:43

Well, again, sometimes you just needed to have a body running cars. As a a girl, I was smaller than most of the teammates, so there are events that require speed, acceleration, um, and things like that. I was not the best driver, but I could I could drop the bell when I needed to. Um, and also we also had a a race um that went through water, and so the flotation device had to hold up the car, go through a lake, like there were no tires on the ground, they were just paddling, and you didn't want to be adding weight to the car for those reasons. So there were times when I would get in the car and drive into a pond. Um there, uh, I hate to admit, how many times I left my phone in my pocket when I did this.

SPEAKER_01 34:29

It was more than one. Um and those were the days when phones were not like water resistant. Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 34:36

And my mom used to call the shop and she'd be like, and at one point she was like, you need to get a cell phone. And this was so like pro e and cell phones and things, like all those came out while I was in college. Like I resisted it as long as I could because paying to live was expensive, paying to live with a cell phone even more so. And my mom was just like, I'm tired of talking to your teammates and having to rely on them to get you a message. Like, you need to get a phone. But I drove over my phone, I rode my phone into the pond. I was not, I am tough on these things. Like, I don't even know. So um, that's fine. You know, 20 years in, I'm not as bad as that used to be to a cell phone, but I'm not good. I'm not sure. Well, cell phones have also gotten a little bit better. It's gotten a little bit better, but I can tell you that the front and the back piece on this phone have been replaced multiple times. So, like sometimes, like, you know, we were just trying to use what everybody brought to the table to their to the best advantage for the team and to the best advantage for the person. So whether it was because I was not a good machinist, I was doing frame stuff, or whether it was because I was smaller, I was doing acceleration and things like that. So, like, that's that's how I got into it. We also uh at a certain point uh did manage to build a track at RIT. So we would we would go out and just tear up the grass and try not to do it too much for some of our testing. We would do some testing in parking lots, so just it's cool though, it's a lot of fun to drive a little car around. So uh once you do it one time, like you just want to keep doing it. Yeah, that was that's what we all kept doing it for was that like that little high that we would get a chance to go run around at it. And a lot of it was in preparation for the racing. So uh our team had two cars that we would run every year. One was the one we built every year, and one was the one that we had built the previous year. Okay. So, and you would get numbers based on how you finished in the previous year. So, you know, if we finished fifth place, that was the number five car at that race. And then we would sign up, and then that would be the number sixty-eight car. So we would have the number five and the number sixty eight, and like we would just prepare both teams uh because we had enough teammates to run two cars. About how many teammates does it take to run a car? So to run one car, you need at least two because you have to have someone walk with you right uh everywhere. But we had again, we had our our overall team lead, and then we had our project team lead. So there's design and project, and then there was then there were the individual things. So probably six or seven team leads, um, and then probably twice as many people that would run or that would help us build the car. So we would have 10 to 15 students at each race. Okay. So we would take two minivans full of kids and a Penske truck full of cars, wow, and drive as long as it took to get to whatever race. And we would get a hotel and and we just were a race team. That's what we would do. We'd show up at the race and set up and do design presentations and then run the course as required.

SPEAKER_01 37:42

Talk a little bit about that too, and and also talk about it in conjunction with what are what are the areas of competition outside of just the race like itself, because obviously you want to win.

SPEAKER_00 37:52

It was usually, I think it was two or three days, depending on what we were doing. Um, but the East Race had the water course. So, in addition to the design presentations for the overall design and then for each individual component of the car, we had uh acceleration, we had maneuverability.

SPEAKER_01 38:13

That was sorry, what you also didn't see was Allie pretending like she was steering us like that.

SPEAKER_00 38:18

That's right, maneuverability. We had the suspension course there, and then the the water course, the water maneuverability, and then the big race was a uh four-hour race around a course, and it was basically graded by how many laps around you got. One of the years we did a hundred-mile race because it was SAE's 100th anniversary, so that was that, but it ended up being about a four-hour course almost exactly. We were like, okay, well, I guess we're gonna call it that, but that's what it was the same thing. So it sounded like it sounded like a lot more, like a hundred-mile race. And then so east, west, and midwest were in three different tracks each year, hosted by three different colleges. So um RIT did, I think the year after I graduated, hosted the East Race. Okay, and it was cold because it's cold in the water in June in New York, but the weird the Florida one was really nice because the water was much warmer down there, but very muddy. Yeah. So a little swampy. Yeah, very swampy. Yeah. Um so that's the the first day was a lot of the the presentations and the individual uh events, and then the second day would be the course, and then we would have like a an award ceremony afterwards. Okay. So two very long days of setting up races and and running things. And so we would have decided ahead of time who was gonna drive and which event. Again, I never did maneuverability, that was not my strong suit. Um, but uh I did a few acceleration events. My friend Paula would also run acceleration events, so there were two girls, so um, and then we would take turns. That four-hour race is real hard on the body, even when you're in college. Um, so because there's jumps and there's turns and there's crashes and things go wrong. I was at a race one time and I had like the whole carburetor apart, but I'm covered in dirt and you can't get off the course because the car wouldn't go. Yeah, and like nobody's allowed to come on the course because it's dangerous. So we have a whole bunch of there's like the safety features of all of this were crazy. And so, like, my mom and dad are like on the other side of the fence, like watching me take this carburetor apart. And I'm like, Can you guys go get one of my teammates? I need some tools here, so like they're trying to run and like get me tools, and I'm like with my dirty hands and my gloves, trying to like, because it couldn't take any of the safety features, yeah. Wipe them up, trying to and like uh I'm covered in gas and dirt and dust and got it back together and drove out around to the end of the course. And you could come off if you needed to, but uh you didn't want to, you wanted to just be running as much as you could, so you probably run-I mean, half an hour, an hour each race and crank out laps if you could. Yeah, um, but you needed to be paying attention if you had to put that carburetor back together while you were on the course.

SPEAKER_01 41:07

Yeah. Um that's crazy, like on the fly, like having to fix your own car.

SPEAKER_00 41:13

Yep. And and what's funny is like because and they would tell you, like, you know, they were these little engines that had like four parts together. Like at one point, we just had one, like half of part in our apartment, and it got confiscated because you weren't allowed to have that at the apartment, and you're like, Oh, uh, I didn't know you guys were doing an inspection today. Uh, so we had to go and like get it back, and then um they would give me refreshers because I don't have the longest term memory. Like, I know I could take a carburetor apart and put it back together, but I would also need to look it up before I do it at this point. So, like, I had just gotten like this is how you do it. And then I went out and I was like, Did you guys know that this is gonna break when I was out here? Like, all right, that's good thing we just went over this. Cool but not cool, right? But those were the races, like you just you'd go out and you'd go all out as fast as you can. It's just like watching any races anywhere. Yeah, uh, you know, we checked to make sure the tires were at the pressure we wanted, the suspension was working, and you'd have to tune the suspension based on who was driving. You know, like if there's a bigger guy in, it would be a little bit stiffer. If it was me, it would be a little bit looser, maybe. I don't know. They they would just make sure that it worked for whoever if they forgot and I had to climb in, like that was a hard ride. If you rolled over in the middle of the race, you just had to sit there. And we would do practicing too, because you know, like we had restraints that your arms wouldn't go outside of the roll cage. They you would sit there and like your first thought is to stop yourself from right? Oh, yeah, and like so. We would practice rolling over. We did all of those things to make sure that we stayed safe. You didn't have neck braces and helmets and all that stuff. So that's crazy. Like, that's just stuff I would never have thought about. Yeah, and when when I'm talking about it now, like I I feel like I'm just kind of remembering all of the things that we did, but like it's it's just like any engineering project is like there's always a safety concern, there's always time, there's always money, there's always can it be made? Should it be made? Should it be yeah, like um all of the things, and these were all they were all very relevant to the Mini Baja team, and then they're very relevant to every other project I've ever done. Sure. Since then.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

Yeah. Uh before I get to my next question, just uh out of curiosity, were there schools that were bigger rivals for you guys than other schools, or did it, was it really just like like an open field every time you went to a race?

SPEAKER_00 43:40

Um yeah, there were some uh bigger rivals. I want to say like Michigan State, the blue and yellow. They were very good. Uh there's the team from Corning, I think, started like right as I like at the end of it, and they just came in and hit it hard and fast. And like we were like, oh man, their car looks just like ours. And then they did just as well. And they're just like a second-year team. And we're like, maybe we shouldn't have been so free and open with what. But you know, like if you can just come in and do it like that, yeah. It's something that we've been struggling to do, like you have to be begrudgingly impressed. Yes. But it's basically like the bigger schools with more resources, more, you know, bigger engineering schools that wanted to be doing it. Sure. Um, it was, I wouldn't have called it like a second class thing, but again, like the engineering students that were very into the very technical engineering stuff were on the formula team. And they they had a different personality uh for their whole team than the Baja team did. Like we are obviously a little bit more rough and tumble. Fun is what you mean to say. I know. I mean, I had take classes with the formula kids too. So they weren't my favorite people, but you know, the work was hard, and sometimes you just needed someone to study with, and they were helpful.

SPEAKER_01 44:57

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 44:58

Fine, they were fine. Like, but there was one kid we called Pissant, and that was his name for a long time. And to this day, I'm like, I'm sure Adam is a fine human being. Sure. And I'm sure, I sure hope he's not listening to this. But man, I had so many classes with that kid, and you would have thought eventually he would have given any sign of respect. But no, I was just some dumbass to him. But like he also taught me a lot about how to use Pro E. And we also had to be, you know, like lab partners, and fine, I did my work on time, and so did he, and we got A's. Like, we were both mad about having to be each other's partner, but and we did it, it was fine.

SPEAKER_01 45:39

So I mean, the the real life lesson there is there are tons of people like him. Yeah, like even if he's not like that anymore, and hopefully he's not.

SPEAKER_00 45:46

Hopefully he's not, but I definitely worked with a few more piss anth. That's what I'm saying. I don't even know where he got that nickname, but that's what they called him on the formula team. Everybody called this kid piss ant, so it was definitely not just me, but sure.

SPEAKER_01 45:57

So you didn't make it up for him, is what you're saying.

SPEAKER_00 46:00

I did not make it up for him at all. No, yeah, but the formula team, but Lynn, some of them were great. Like, you know, I've got some Facebook friends that are still from the formula team. Like Nanda was great, and they were just not the guys I was hanging out with all the time.

SPEAKER_01 46:14

They just weren't my friends, they were the formula team. For and again, just for anybody who is like sort of only slightly aware of racing. I like I'm not into racing, but I do watch on Netflix Drive to Survive because it's like soap opera version of Oh, yeah. They could have made some shows about our race team. I imagine, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:35

That could have been a reality TV show, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:37

Um, but when you say formula, that's what you're talking about, right? Like that that type of racing.

SPEAKER_00 46:43

I mean small road racing, the bald tires, the the tuned engine, like they were very detail-oriented, yes, is what we will call them. That's polite. I think that's great. They were and it like there was they were a good team. They won as many awards as we did, probably more. I don't know. I wasn't paying that close attention to them. I was busy, but um they they they were a good team and they were helpful when we needed help. And I think even like some of the stuff that we did with Penske with the shocks, like I think they did some Penske shock stuff too, and so we had to like share some resources and things like that. So obviously very different suspended systems, but still Penske. Yeah, so fair enough. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_01 47:23

Yeah, so let's shift gears a little bit. You were let's kind of just talk about the elephant in the room, which is women in STEM, period, right? So you were already a woman in a field that had far more men than women, just uh in mechanical engineering in general.

SPEAKER_00 47:38

Yeah, to this day.

SPEAKER_01 47:39

Yes, yep. Can you talk a little bit about what was similar or different in that regard with Mini Baja, like specifically, and and I guess like because obviously there are similarities because it's still STEM-based, but as far as feeling otherized or not, like yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:59

So yeah, there's definitely like I didn't really pay that much attention to it. Um, it didn't really occur to me as I was signing up to be a mechanical engineer that this was something that I was gonna have to deal with. I I I personally and I know this now, not everybody just walks through life thinking like they should definitely be where they are. Right. Um I I was told I could be whatever I wanted to be when I grew up, and that stuck. That's what I did. You believed it. And I believed it. Uh my dad didn't lie to me, so um I so I carried that with me. Uh, not everybody does, but there is and and I'm guilty of it too. There is a stigma against women in engineering. I there was a society of women engineers, there still is, I assume. Um, but in college, like there were the the women engineers and they had a whole club, and I was like, I'm I'm in a club, and I'm not gonna join your club. You guys are weird. Why do you need to have a whole group of women? And you know, now I'm like in my 40s, and I'm like, uh, yeah, I'm gonna go to a book club, which is just my group of mom friends, yeah, and then we do and like that to me, that's that's a group of women that I didn't know I needed in my life until they were there. And possibly if I had spent a little bit more time on it, you know, 20 years ago, uh, you know, I could have come to that realization earlier. But um uh better late than never. And and really uh the guys at RIT tried very hard. Like I said, my friends were like try to be protective. I didn't need that kind of protection. What I needed was support, right? So uh and and the people that I do miss the most are the people that were supportive. Uh but then you know you break up with your college boyfriend, all these guys are his friends and not yours suddenly, and you're like, guys, fuck. So there was some of that, and I didn't quite realize it until I broke up with my college boyfriend and lost all of my friends, except for my friend Paula, who was the other girl on the Mini Baja team, because there was a joke for a long time that there always had to be two, there can be only two. They made Sith Lord jokes about us because we were engineering students, so you know what are you gonna do about that? And I'm sure that there have been more and less than that, but there um there are always two, at least. Um, and then there were a couple of friends that stuck by me, and those are the ones, and I even got an apology recently from uh a friend of mine who was like, I'm really sorry, we were friends, and I didn't follow through on that when that relationship ended, and I was like, Yeah, I know, but it's been 15 years I'm over it. It's cool. Like, don't worry about it. We're good now. Uh we're good now. I appreciate you coming to that realization like eventually, but you know, so then you know, looking back, the people that were the most supportive were the people that also agreed I belonged in the room. Yeah. And you know, they're just there just are people who until they're gone, you don't realize don't think you belong there.

SPEAKER_01 51:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:02

Or there are people who will overtly act like you don't belong there. There was a lot of that at CNH when I did get my job. And so, you know, Mini Baja led to me getting my job at CNH because not only did I use ProE, which was the system that they were using, I had been to Brazil with the race team and uh a friend of mine worked at CNH and was like, hey, you know, they've got open positions and combines, let's see what you can do. Yeah, and I went down there and interviewed with the combine team, and I was like, Ah, this is not gonna work because I don't know anything about combines, and the whole world does, and all of these Midwest engineering boys want this job. And I'm not qualified, I don't want to work with these guys anyway. And I got an interview with uh the cotton team because nobody knows anything about cotton pickers, but they do cotton in Piracy Caba, Brazil, and I knew Pro E. So, you know, I knew more than most people were gonna know out of college about com uh cotton pickers, so that worked out really well. But that was a direct line from Mini Baja to CNH. But then, you know, you get to CNH, and it's easy in college to filter out who you who's not gonna believe that you belong there, with the exception of some of the professors. But even at that point, sure, you just you know, it's it's a quarter, you're in their class, and head down, do the work, head down, do the work, and then prove them wrong because like on a piece of paper, like it doesn't matter. But at at CNH, it was really obvious who didn't believe that I belonged there, who was gonna continue to treat me like a little girl all the time. There are still people in my life now who will come in and be like, you know, they'll talk to me like I'm the barista at the local coffee shop and not the owner.

SPEAKER_01 52:44

Not the owner.

SPEAKER_00 52:44

So like I'm like, okay.

SPEAKER_01 52:47

Not the owner who just made the delicious sourdough biscuit you're about to put in your mouth over.

SPEAKER_00 52:51

I just made all of this, yeah. And I run all of this, and I and I grew shit that's in the room. And I grew up and I did this fucking counter. And I built this fucking counter that you're leaning up against, talking down to me. I'm like, I don't know how old I need to get before I stop looking like a little kid to some of these people, but yeah, that's it's everywhere in the engineering world. So not only do you have to continuously reinforce to yourself that I belong in this room, which is a thing I do naturally, but not everybody does. Right. At a certain point, they are gonna give a promotion to someone who's not qualified because he's uh an old guy. Um, they are going, and then that guy is gonna tell you he can't be your mentor, even though he's been assist, you know, specify specifically designated as your mentor, yep, because he can't take you out to lunch by yourself because he doesn't eat with women that aren't his wife. Yep. And that is a wild thing to say to somebody who is 30 when you're 60. In the 2000s, by the way. We live in the 2000s. I'm like, we live in the 2000s. I'm like, I am better at your job than you will ever be. And then that is also why I left. I'm gonna go. I've I've reached the peak of what they're going to let me do here. I'm and then I I look for other engineering jobs, do all the things, and I just didn't. I was like, it's gonna be the same everywhere. Yeah, I will go do whatever I want then. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:13

Because you can. It is really interesting though, because I and I never really thought about it in quite that same way about the fact that when you're in college, it is a lot easier to filter out those who are not supportive for those who are.

SPEAKER_02 54:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:27

And it so it's funny, like in some ways, some of what you're describing is like honestly, the blueprint for how shit should be in the real world, in a way, like the collaboration and the resourcing and the how do we support, how do we lift everybody up, all of those things. And yet then you get into the quote real world and you have this structure and this hierarchy that are like you guys are doing this wrong. Yeah, and the mini Baja team does this so much better. Yeah, so it's really interesting framing. I don't think I ever really thought about it like that.

SPEAKER_00 54:56

Yeah, and then you know, one of the things I tried to do is I was like, okay, so if you guys are gonna do what you guys are gonna do, I learned how to do it differently. So I would be at DH and they'd be like, Here's your job, good luck going to talk to Bill. He's a pain in the ass. Um, okay. So I was like, well, Bill's a pain in the ass. I guess I know a couple guys like that. Let me see what I can do. And then I went down there and I was like, hey, uh Bill, can you tell me what you need so that I can get this done? And he was like, Nobody has ever asked me to teach them how to do this.

SPEAKER_01 55:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:31

The other engineers were teaching themselves how to do it, and then Bill would get whatever shit they gave him, and he'd be like, and then he'd be a dick about it. Sure. And I'd be like, okay, well, Bill, well, you show me what you want, and I wrote it down, and then I went and did that, and he was like, Nobody's ever done this right the first time. And I'm like, You taught me how to do it. Like, so that was a lesson I learned from you know, the guys who did the frame before me, and they taught me how to do the frame, and then I taught Justin and we moved on. Like we're good to go. Like, that's how that should work. And I'm sorry if you know Kevin has a complex that he just knows how to do all this right, even though he literally just moved here and had to learn how to do a new program and work with a new guy in the shop, and then was kind of mad when he got told that it was wrong. Yeah. Well, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's not how it goes. So I spent a lot of time using those lessons. Tell me what you need to get this job done. Tell me what I need to provide, tell me what my job is. Like, let's and I'll write it down. I wrote it down every time. And so everybody who came in after me was trained how to do their job. And then most of the time when I had issues at CNH, it would be because someone else was trying to cover for the fact that I was gonna do my job wrong. And I was like, I haven't even done my job yet. You're messing that up. Because from my perspective, that's not how engineering should be working. But from your perspective, engineer messes it up all the time. So give me the opportunity to do it right, and then I'll make sure everybody else does it right too. Yeah, and like that's it's so funny.

SPEAKER_01 57:04

Documentation is like so sorely. I love it, it's amazing, isn't it? But you can walk into almost any corporate setting.

SPEAKER_00 57:12

And that's a lesson we had to learn at Mini Baja. Exactly. Because you don't win a design competition if you don't have any documentation for how their design was done. Exactly right. So exactly.

SPEAKER_01 57:21

Yeah, I love that. So many life lessons in Mini Baja.

SPEAKER_00 57:25

That's it was something at the time that that I knew was good. Yeah. It was something that I knew was going to be good for me, even though I literally just went and took engineering on a whim and then joined this team because my friends were there. Yep. But like, I was like, but this is good. This is good for me. The the the aspirations to be good, the aspirations to make everybody else around you good. Like those were, you know, I I hope those guys that started the team are still doing that. Yeah. Um, I, you know, we're we're not friends, I don't interact with them much anymore, but I use all of the stuff that they built, you know, 25 years ago. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:04

Day to day. Yeah, day to day. So you brought up Brazil, and I do want to talk about that because I do think that that was like a you only went the one time, right, for racing. I went the one time for racing. For racing. Yes, I did.

SPEAKER_00 58:16

Because they they learn very early on you don't send a girl out into the field uh with cotton pickers by myself. Yeah. It was it's not a safe, it's unfortunately it's not a safe thing for me to do as a woman in engineering. Um, and it would be even worse in Brazil. And that is something they were very concerned about when we went to Brazil in college. Because it's it's a different country. It is. They're doing different things or um a little bit ahead and a little bit behind uh on some some you know social things. But we hosted the Brazilian team at RIT as ambassador school for them to uh go to a Midwest race. So in Ohio, we did that two times, I think, while I was there, probably they're still doing it. Um, and then we had finished well enough to get invited to go down to Brazil uh for a race, but we did not want to send our good car. So the car that we were building and racing in the US, because we had it, like we went back to back. I went, we went down to Brazil and then immediately on to the West race. Okay. So like we had three cars running at that point. So we had our two US cars and then had sent a third car down to Brazil, painted it red, white, and blue, all the flag stuff. We did everything, and then we went to uh we had to ship it in a container, like it went down there months before we did. It was not at the school when we arrived. Oh no, we had to so we'd known these guys like a little bit because but they're speaking Portuguese, they're in their shop, they're doing all the stuff, and we're like, we got Wagner, who was a great translator, but there were like eight of us Wagner and like some of them spoke some English, and um like we spent it took I feel like it took forever. I feel like I was down there for months trying to put this car back together. I'm sure we were down there five or six days, maybe a week, with the travel time and everything. It's the first time I'd ever been on a plane. Okay. Back to Toronto to Chicago to Oregon and then back. Like Well, then you're a seasoned traveler by the time you're gonna be. I'm a seasoned traveler, but I don't I don't like to do big trips anymore. I'm like, we're good. I I live in Glen Rock and I stay in Glen Rock and I work in Glen Rock.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:31

Um but um we'll get you out to Pittsburgh one of these days.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:34

Uh I've been to Pittsburgh, it's not I but I love a good road trip, a train trip, but not a plane trip. Yeah, it's just not my jam. But but we had a great time. Uh, but it was, you know, again, a different shop, a different language, a different country. They were very worried that Paula and I were going to be assaulted in some way. And so they they they were like, don't dress up. They they they went to some prostitutes. The team did. I don't know what they did because we weren't allowed to go. Oh my god the women were not allowed to go out to the bars where these um things were happening. I'm sure they had names for them. It wasn't uh, you know, they were prostitutes, but they also were at a house of whatever ill cute, and we were not allowed to go. But then then you learn who your friends are because Dan stayed with me and Paula, and the rest of them went out. So we and it was a great night. We got very drunk in our hotel room and did the Beyonce walk for a long time. Excellent. So, but it was great. I'm sure Dan can still do it. He did a good job. So but then we, you know, we we had overstayed because we didn't leave when we were supposed to, because our car wasn't there and then we weren't ready, and so we had to split up into some of the apartments of the team members in Brazil, and they were like, You and Paula can go together, and the rest of the team went to another apartment, and then the guy whose apartment we were staying at was like, Hey, my roommate's home, but he's asleep, don't worry about it. Shower, whatever, we'll come back and we'll meet you down in the courtyard at 6 a.m. Like we had a whole plan, and then he left. So he just left us alone with the strange dude who was sleeping, who was sleeping, and so then we we shower, we clean up, we half sleep on the couch, like we're like one eye open, yeah. Like we're like in this weird apartment by ourselves, and we're like, all right, we have to go down now, it's time to meet everybody at the courtyard, and the hallway lights were on like motion sensors, but they were tied to the elevator. So me and Paula are trying to figure out how to turn the lights on because it's pitch black, it's barely light out outside, and we're like, we can't like the light didn't turn on, and we open the door and we're like, so we're like holding the door open and like trying to like reach back to each other and then try and push the button so that we can like see but not see, but it was so dark, and we're like, we don't know Portuguese, we don't know anything. It's not even your place, like you're not even familiar with the place. Then we get down there, gone, they're gone. Nobody's there. Okay, so great. So we go back up now that we know how to use the lights, and we go into this and we're like, all right, well, where's the phone? The phone's not on the thing, so we push the thing and it starts beeping, and I it's like it's in the roommate's room.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:13

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:13

And so I open the door to try and get it, and it's on the floor, and there's like a handgun next to it. Oh my god, and this dude is still passed up, and I was like, There's a gun in here. And so I go and I grab the gun and the phone, and we go back out, and then we're like, don't know how to use the code for Portuguese to call. We couldn't call this other apartment, we had no idea where they were, so we couldn't go banging on doors. And the roommate finally wakes up and is like, What? And we gave him this note. Oh my god. And then the phone number, like, can you call? So he teaches us how to call and he goes back into this room. And I'm like, if he ever noticed that the gun was sitting on the table next to me, he didn't say shit. Oh my god. We eventually finally get somebody to answer the phone. All those motherfuckers had fallen asleep. They just fell asleep. Good. I'm glad they had a good restful night's sleep. And wow. And then we go to the hotel and then uh we're out, and then they go out for the night, and then we do, I'm like, oh my gosh. There's a lot of concern that we were gonna get hurt, but not a lot of well-thought-out plans for how to take care of us.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:23

And also what I heard out of that whole story is that your fingerprints are on a gun in Brazil that could have been used for crimes.

unknown 1:04:32

No.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:33

So you better never go back to Brazil.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:35

We don't really have any plans to anyway, but like Brazil was wild. Like, you they were like, you don't stop at the stoplights.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:42

Oh. Because you'll get welcome to South America, by the way. That happened outside. Oh god.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:50

So that we had like a we had a driver, we had Wagner, we had like eight of us, we're just piled on top of each other, like in the car. Yeah. We're like, all right, good luck robbing us. Like, we can't even get out of this car. Um, and then like we we get to the race, and then we're like out, like out in the field, like tuning our cars and stuff, like you do. And then like the police show up with their like machine guns and shit, and they're like trying to give us a hard time and like shake us down. And we're like college kids, yeah. We don't have any I don't know what they did. They probably bribed them or did something, but they had to bribe the people like at the port to get our car in here, and like that was part of the expenses. They just knew it was gonna happen.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:32

So they just built it in.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:32

So they just built it in. Like, we just I was like, that was that was wild. But then then we got to the race and it was it was just a mini Baja race. It was the design and this and it was a mini, yeah, it was it was wild. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:48

It was wild. And you're like basically presenting a car, so because it's the third car and it's like not your US cars, not my US cars, not my design. Right. You're presenting the design for something else's.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:00

And they they they won and like the frame won this award and I had to like go up and like accept an award for I'm pretty sure it was Shang's car for Shang Sui. And I'm like, thank you. It was a good time. We're all listening to like um Outcast Hey Yeah, okay, was big at the time, and the song was in Portuguese, and then you get to the part and everybody knew hey, and like we just but not any of the rest of it. None of the rest of it. They're shaking it like a Polaroid picture, and we're like, okay, cool, whatever you just said. Like, but that's so great. But it was, yeah, it was so wild. Like it was uh it was a whole different world, and then it was a mini Baja race.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:37

And how like my god, this how surreal that has to be too, where you're like you've just had this completely unnatural experience, and then you go back where it's like sane and normal to you.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:50

Yeah, well, I mean sane and normal as as sane and normal as you know, the end of the school year exactly guts. Like, because there were times like the races would happen at the end of the school year, and we were on the quarter system and not the semester system. So it seems like everybody else was done, yeah, and we weren't yet. So we're like trying to like manage finals and essays and presentations and things like this that you have to do, and also like, hey, I'm gonna be in Ohio for like these three days, or hey, uh, you know, Arizona is a two-day drive away and then the race and then a two-day drive back. Like you, like we're trying to navigate these things, so you're having to get like RIT had really good advisors and and student help and things like that. So if you had an issue because you were doing something, they were gonna be like, Yeah, you're doing something, like let's figure this out. Um, but there's you know, you have a whole team of kids trying to get extensions or trying to come back for a race or for a test or do the test before we go. Right. Like we were just, I don't even know how we survived. Like, because you know, like you're up till three, you're up at six, you're we're, you know, working and building and schooling and drinking and yeah, doing college things.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:03

Yes, yeah, for sure. Which I I think is key to sort of keep in mind is like what you're describing and and how we're talking about it. I mean, obviously we're telling like a lot of stories about it, but it all it sounds like it's full-time and it is, it was, yeah. But also it's not your full-time quote job because your full-time job is school. Yeah, and also your part-time jobs and yes, and your actual paid part-time jobs and the just the job of being a college kid, which is you know, very often learning to do laundry and cook and like plus adulting, and plus adulting. Like we were we were not great at it. Um, you never are in college, yeah. Which is also the funny thing about the Brazil trip is probably that was for the best that you knew nothing.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:50

Like you went down and just experienced just cold, and like we um my friend Paula can't do dairy, so Wagner would be reading us, and then he would go, Not for you, not for you. And like we would learn we learn from reading all the menus, not for Paula, not for you, not for you. And like I was uh I was a vegetarian at the time, and like And Brazil is like and Brazil is meat, and Brazil was like, I knew this was coming, I knew I was gonna have to eat, and like we went to the the steakhouses with the swords, we did that so many times. And at a certain point, I was like, all right, look, fine, I will eat the meat, I have no problem with it, it's delicious, I'm having a good time. I've eaten as many french fries as I can because there are no no vegetables on the menu. Yep. And then I was like, oh, finally, we're at a restaurant that's got a salad on the menu. And I ordered the salad and it came out, and it was basically it was a meat tray, like you would get if you had ordered like a sandwich tray, and it was like all these rolled up meats and the lettuce underneath must have been what they meant by salad. Because I was like, I you had a meat so I just ordered a burger that would have been less meat than this. It was so like this huge thing. Oh my god, some french fries, please.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:03

So great.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:05

We ate so many, but their french fries in Brazil were on point. At least they're good.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:10

But um but yeah, it's the best time to go. Like you you just go cold. And could you imagine now if somebody was like, So you're gonna go do this thing, and we're gonna go plop you into the middle of this country where you don't know the language, and you would probably be like, absolutely fucking not. I'm doing this.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:26

Nope, nope, absolutely. No, yeah, and like that was and there's a finite amount of time that you have with your friends in college, yes, and like to not take advantage of it, like I had the opportunity to go to South African race and I didn't take it. And like there are very few things that I look back on and been like, I should have done that. Like, I should have done that. Yeah, it was I had three weeks, like like someone had to drop out, and so the space opened up. I hadn't really been a full member of the Mini Baja team for that long. Like, I I wasn't designing frames in or anything at that point. Like, I could have gone, I could have supported them. I hadn't been to more than like one race. I was like, I didn't have my shots, I didn't have my passport, I had finals coming up. Like, there were a lot of reasons not to go. Yep. Looking back now, 25 years later, I should have gone. Yeah. When was the next time I'm gonna go to South Africa? Right. Should have gone. But but all of the great things I learned, like that was one of them. Yeah, you have to learn that stuff. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:25

Speaking of, so and and this was the question I was gonna have for before we wrap. Obviously, the racing was very cool. And the just the the time that you were able to have with all of it, like the like designing and building and and that teamwork and the camarader camaraderie was obviously amazing. And I imagine that you've learned a ton of very valuable life lessons. We've talked a little bit about some of them kind of along the way, we've peppered them in, but just some overall takeaways like that you took into life after college. Can you share your thoughts on? Like, what do what do you think some of the biggest takeaways were from that time?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:04

I would say that that college is the real world. Like, they you go to college and they say, go to college and then get a job and join the real world. College is the real world, like to me, that was the basis of how I live my life. Like, I mean, yeah, like you're a kid and you're learning all this stuff. High school is the real world too. Like, there are times I'll look at high school kids and I'm like, you guys are figuring it out. Like, you'll be okay. Everybody's like, kids these days, and like kids these days, we're all kids. Don't you remember being a kid? I learned a lot. Yeah. Um, you know, college was the real world. It was uh the basis on which I built upon what I'm doing. Like I'm I'm the kind of person, I'll do it. I had a good time, done with it. Like, I you know, I I do leave people behind if they're not immediately in my world right now. There are a few, there's just a few ties that I've but that's how I am. That's not how everybody is. But like college is the real world. All of those people have impacted the rest of my life. And you know, I encourage anybody who has any inkling that they want to go do something to just go do it. You belong in any space you want to belong in as long as you are willing to learn and you know, do your best. Like these are things that I personally hold valuable, but I found a group of people who also hold them valuable. Yeah. Like they they wanted to learn, they wanted to do their best, they wanted to do their best by me, and I wanted to do my best by them. That's really all, you know, any relationship, any job, any project that you work on, that's really all you need to get started.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:41

Yeah. So yeah, that's a good one. I actually really like that framing. And I think about it sometimes because like I I just had a conversation with one of my kids who was like, he I think he likes to call college, I think he calls it fake, fake adulting, where you have like because you have that sort of in-between phase of like I still sort of have like my parents to kind of catch me, but I'm still also trying to like figure stuff out. But I think that's all in the framework, right? It's like like I actually kind of like it better how you how you yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:13

I was uh I mean it was safe for me, it's not safe for everybody. It's not safe for everybody, you know. It was my parents were 45 minutes away. So when my friends were missing home, we would go to my house. Yeah, like mom and dad would make dinner, we went to my dad's football games, he was coaching, like they would come over, we had an end-of-year summer uh party or end of year party before the summer at my parents' house because you know, they'd come hang out. Like we had a house 45 minutes away. We had a family that would make dinner. My grandmother lived in town, you know. Like I was from the area, right? Um, but I had friends from Maine who, you know, had to mortgage their whole life to try and get this engineering degree. Yeah. And I, you know, I had bills that I had to pay, but I also had help. I could move back to my parents' house when I graduated. Right. I didn't know what I was doing after school, right? But I figured it out like everybody does. You know, but that is the real that is the real work of becoming an adult. And yeah, like you just go to college one day and now you're in charge. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:19

That's right of all this.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:20

That's right. Like RIT made you live on the dorms for a reason. They made you not have a car for a reason. So you had to be there paying attention to what you were doing right here. Right. Right. And then we all started there and had to move on. And you know, it was the right choice for me. It's not the right choice for everybody, but it's not easy for anybody. It's hard work to learn how to be an adult and be out there and do all of that. It is. And some people never fully finish that work. It's true. So that is so true.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:49

Um it is the one, it is the place though, too, where you go and learn about people who are not like you. Yeah. It's where I think for some, not for everybody, but for some people, that is the place where you go and realize not everybody grew up in a neighborhood like yours or went to a school like yours or has a family constructed like yours, it is where you tend to like open your mind really fast.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:15

Or you don't, and it's not great.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:17

And like, you know, I I my parents were always very open and accepting, but you know, I'm I'm a white girl from a small white town. That's where I live now. It is where we are. And like, but that's what the Mini Baja team was, too. It's like there's a bunch of white guys doing a bunch of you know, white guy things. Like that's what we did. But I I didn't grow up in that world. It was still, it's still racing, it's still teamwork, it's still a lot of um learning who people are all of the time. And um, you know, CNH had a a more diverse offering, a more diverse uh collection of people that I had to work with. And and it was easy to do because engineering does have all of that. A lot of people from different walks of life, a lot of people from different countries, and you know, got a little bit of a taste of it, and that was enough for me to learn, yeah and and to apply those things. And now, like I'm still learning and meeting new kinds of people, even though we're a lot of us from a similar background. Yeah, there's just a never-ending amount of different kinds of people.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:20

Yeah. So love it. Yeah. All right. Three good things about your week rolling seven days. The rolling seven days. I know. You love it. Let's see.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:30

Rolling seven days. The the first good thing was uh I did get my breakfast done almost entirely on time this morning.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:37

Um I love the almost entirely on time.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:41

Um I but and it came together really well. Every week I I get the opportunity to bake food for people and and it's very fulfilling in a way that you know maybe Mini Baja was for me personally, I love to do food for people. Um, and that is a good thing about every week for me. The next thing I would say is that my farmers market season opens next Sunday. Yeah, and I'm not stressed about it. So how is that possible? I've been running the farmers market for like eight years. Yeah, and it's just it's going now. Everybody seems to know what they're doing. I know what I'm doing, I'm much more comfortable with it. We are doing a parade next Sunday. What? And I forgot about it a little bit, and so I haven't actually started building my float. So I'm a little bit stressed about that, but I remembered last week instead of this week. So I'm amazing. So you're ahead of the game. I'm ahead of the game, we're doing great. Um, and third good thing, my son turns 12 on Monday. Wow. So we're gonna have a party at the park. It's gonna be 90 degrees outside. I just heard that the other day. I was like, what the?

SPEAKER_01 1:18:49

It's been like miserably cold, like unseasonably snow.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:52

And like 40 overnight for like weeks on end. And then all of a sudden Monday it's like 90. So what? But yeah, Enzo turns 12, and we're gonna have a party at the park, and I I love doing that stuff too, because that again involves feeding people. Yes, yes, it does. So uh we're get to do some silly things because 12-year-olds are still in the silly thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:14

They are that's it's sort of the beauty of 12 still.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:17

I I like I strongly identify with the nerdery of a 12-year-old boy, too. Like he's he's reading the same kind of books I'm reading. We wear the same size shoe right now. Like I'm like uh like Enzo and I are on the same wavelength right now. So uh that's so great. This week is upcoming and is gonna be a good week.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:37

So I love that. Yeah, and happy birthday to Enzo. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this. This was so much fun. Sure, thanks. I know. I'm just we're just gonna have to start doing like an alley series, like I don't know, quarter. We'll talk about cotton pickers if we need to, or yeah, more food. More food.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:53

Biscuits and gravy if anybody wants to forget about it.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:55

Biscuits and gravy were so good. So for anybody local to Glen Rock, uh, make sure you pop into Main Street Market, um, especially because oh my god, the food. When Kenzie and I went to visit yesterday because we wanted to see the remodel and to see how everything looked, Ellie was making bagels and they smelled so fucking good. In fact, when we walked out, Kenzie was like, Man, we should have gotten bagels.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:16

Yeah, making gold bags. She's a bagel kid, too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:20

Yeah. Um, but it was great. I can attest, it was fantastic. Everybody fits it.