Momentum - February 2021 - 23

Career Path

Kelner driving the team's second ever electric-powered Formula SAE car at its unveiling ceremony at RIT in late April 2018.
and I felt like being on the team when it embarked on this
project was the beginning of a new chapter in the team's
history, that I was there to help write.
What is the most interesting project that you are working on
at the moment?
I am currently working with a few members of the software
team at LeoStella to implement a new set of software utilities
to test our satellites in the production line and in the simulator
environments with an emulated version of ground software.
While we have been able to perform end-to-end testing of our
satellites already, these tests are awfully manual, laborious
processes. Bringing the full ground software and flight
software stacks in-house will enable us to automate these endto-end tests, allowing our production team to move on to
developing further improvements that will produce better
satellites, faster.
Who most influenced you on your journey to becoming a
professional engineer?
It was a subtle nudge, but my older brother provided the
inspiration to commit to becoming an engineer. While I was in
high school, he had started watching Formula One racing. I sat
down to watch a race with him and wondered out loud what it
takes to build a racecar to be so much better than another one.
I had such a massive respect for the level of precision,
consistency, and excellence required to be at the top in
something like F1.

MOMENTUM

How did your involvement in SAE activities as a student
prepare you for the workforce?
For my entire time at RIT, I was a member of the Formula SAE
team. Designing and building a Formula car from scratch every
single year created an ever-present challenge. Because of that
constant and massive commitment that it presented, it was
always giving me new problems to go solve, and most
importantly, new things to learn. I strongly believe that most of
my useful experience came not from the classroom, but from
the real things I built in my time on that team. It gave me so
many experiences to draw from when faced with similar
challenges in my career.
What do you like to do for fun?
Unsurprisingly, I like to go fast around a racetrack in a car these
days! Spending so much time around racecars in Formula SAE,
and loving it so much, it felt natural to stick with cars and
motorsport as a hobby. I eventually bought one car that I can
use now as a fun daily-driver and a weekend track and
autocross car, and I have another one from before I was even
born to use as platform for fun new projects.
Would you like to add any other comments?
Testing has always been my favorite part of any engineering
project, because to me it's a way to uncover mistakes, learn
from them, and make my racecar, satellite, or whatever better
in the process. I think it's important to not fear mistakes,
because there are always opportunities to improve. n

February 2021 23
Momentum - February 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Momentum - February 2021
