The College Years

After high school I headed off to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York.  RPI is made for people like me.  No fluff courses like literature or gym, but a state of the art education based on science and technology coupled with access to things like machine shops and wind tunnels to put your classroom studies to the test.

I quickly made friends with a kid who had a lifted GMC Jimmy in the parking lot.  This friendship yielded a slew of stories about getting stuck in mud and ultimately rolling the truck over on one of our many an off-road excursions. I'm sure I'll give a detailed account at a later date but here is just a taste of what we used to be up to:

While at RPI I became involved with the Formula SAE race car team. I even became involved with the Formula Electric race car team which was a full sized open wheel race car with an electric power plant.
I also ended up running the Rensselaer Student Auto Shop and the Rensselaer Sports Car Association while at school.  The Auto Shop was a student run organization that operated a shop facility for RPI students.  The idea was there was a fully equipped four bay garage on campus that any student could come to and use to perform their own work.  This was a tremendous asset to have on campus and was ultimately where all us like-minded car guys found each other.   At its peak, we had some serious iron (for a bunch of kids) being worked on in that shop.

The Sports Car Association was basically the same group of guys but we organized and held autocross races on campus and road rallies in the area.  We would get some cool hardware showing up for our races. Plus we'd get some of our recently graduated friends showing up with company rental cars!

 

I still can't believe the school supported both of these organizations.