One of the key factors I took into account while deciding which university to go to was the presence of engineering design teams. It wasn't the only factor but it did play a big role.

I've spent two years on the Queen's Rocket Engineering team. My first year on the time was highly exploratory, I divided my time up amongst multiple sub-teams to try and learn as much as I can but had the most fun in the propulsion team. My second year is when I began to focus on the Propulsion team as the safety officer, and now I will be going into my third year on the team as the Propulsion team Lead

There are a couple of obvious reasons to why design teams are valuable.

• Design teams provide experience close to the real world. Tackling hard problems with a team of people and actually producing something tangible to compete with others.
• Choosing to join a team that's interesting to you will lead you to people that are likeminded and are incredibly passionate about what they do
• You'll actually learn how to work with a team and build things, many engineers graduate without even knowing how to actually do that. This is really important to me.
• Companies value it a lot. Ask anyone in industry about the importance of design teams and they'll probably say it matters a lot more than grades. This is my experience at least.
• Your upper years will probably tell you that they wished they joined design teams sooner (see previous point)
• It can be really fun!

A key reason for why design teams are important to me is that it's one of the first non-hackable tests that I have decided to take on.

If you're like me, you probably hate exams. They're supposed to test your knowledge on the course you just took, but in reality there are usually just a few key concepts to understand in order to get a decent grade. Course projects are a bit better since you are forced to produce something that utilizes a broad range of knowledge in a topic, but they are still hackable (hint: just use the rubric)

The way the education system works is critiqued by Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Measures such as test scores became the targets, leading to an optimization towards those targets. Learning gets conflated with grades leading to false conclusions about ones knowledge in a field.

I don't blame students for optimizing towards grades, it's something I struggle with too. Everyone judges us by our grades - graduate programs, scholarships, potential employers, and even our parents at times. I do, however, think that this is dangerous. It doesn't encourage learning but instead trains people towards learning how to get better grades. Paul Graham has an excellent essay on the topic (Lesson to unlearn) that I highly recommend reading.

I honestly can't believe that I get to work on actual rockets, let alone be the person leading a team to design and build rocket engines. The kid inside me is super excited about it and it makes me wake up with joy knowing that this is something I get to do. I'm not sure if this is definitely going to lead to me being able to work in the space industry, but it does feel like I'm getting closer and that's what matters to me.

It is a challenging problem though. None of us here at the team were taught how to build hybrid rocket engines, we weren't taught about rocketry at all. We don't have an aerospace department in the university to ask for advice, we don't have the infrastructure ready to make these engines, we don't have money to motivate people to keep working, we don't have a lot of time to do it because we all have time intensive degrees, we don't have people staying on the team for a long time because people eventually graduate university, we're not sure if we'll get the money we need, and we're not even sure if it'll succeed.

But I like this challenge, because it's an real challenge - an unhackable challenge.

It's not going to be easy, and this is why I may seem like I'm relatively intense about it. But I don't mind it at all because the intensity is supported upon a solid foundation of passion. I truly love the things I get to do. What's more is that I get to build these rockets with people who are incredibly passionate about space and rockets too. No one is here because they are getting paid for it, sure there are bound to be people who come just because it looks nice on a resume, but there are usually a lot more people working out of pure passion. I've met some really amazing people on the team, and I've learnt a heck of a lot from them.