Essays · Engineering education
Some lessons arrive in a lecture hall. Others arrive in a garage in Shizuoka at half past six in the morning, with a borrowed wrench and a noise test you keep failing by three decibels. In September 2009, not long after I had returned to KMUTT, I travelled to Japan with twelve of our mechanical engineering students. We were there to enter the Japan Society of Automotive Engineers (JSAE) Student Formula competition for the first time — Thailand’s rookies among eighty teams, most of whom had done this many times before.
Before we left, the team gathered at the statue of King Mongkut on campus. The students called themselves OPTIMUM; the car they had built over many sleepless months they had christened the Black Pearl. It had already sailed ahead of us to Japan in a wooden crate. When we finally pried it open at the Ogasayama circuit and rolled it into the autumn sun, it felt less like unpacking equipment than like waking something up.
What followed was a humbling education. Our cost report came back heavily penalised. The technical inspection — the gate every car must pass before its engine may even be started — failed us, and then failed us again. A bumper not quite fixed to the frame. A fuel hose clamp of the wrong specification. An exhaust that measured 113 decibels against a limit of 110. Each problem was small; together, with a handful of tools far from home, they were nearly overwhelming. I watched students who had never doubted their car learn what it means to be told, politely and repeatedly, that it was not yet good enough.
And then something happened that I have never forgotten. A team from a nearby Japanese institute — our competitors, strictly speaking — noticed our trouble, walked over, and offered their workshop and their hands. They loaded the Black Pearl onto their own truck and drove it to their university to help us put it right. Honda technicians stationed at the event found a spare part, drilled it, and welded us a new silencer by hand. We passed the noise test at exactly 110 decibels. I have come to think this is the real curriculum of competitions like these: not the engineering alone, but the discovery that the people you are racing against are also the people who will help you race.
On the fourth day, our number 80 finally took to the endurance course. There was no one to beat and nothing to prove but our own resolve. The driver pushed harder than we had dared hope, the tyres complained through every chicane, and the Black Pearl crossed the line having completed the full twenty laps. When the rankings were read on the final morning, KMUTT’s first-ever entry had placed 22nd of 80 — and was named Rookie Winner, the best of the first-timers.
I think about that week often now that my work has moved from the workshop to the business of international partnerships and university leadership. The students who slept four hours a night in Shizuoka learned more about engineering, and about themselves, than any examination could have measured. They learned that failure is not a verdict but a queue you rejoin; that generosity across borders is not naïve but normal; and that representing your country is mostly a matter of doing careful work and being decent to the people beside you.
Those are the same instincts I now try to build into how we send students and colleagues out into the world. The Black Pearl is long retired. The lesson it taught a rookie team — and a young lecturer who came along to watch — has not.