1. Zero prior experience is required to join.

2. Mentorship significantly accelerates your student growth.

3. Mentorship offsets the extra time commitment required.

4. We build globally competing cars from scratch.

5. You will manage $150,000 budgets and market a real working product.

6. Network with teammates in your field doing Co-ops (Ex: SpaceX, Tesla, and many startups)

7. It costs nothing to try and Its worth taking the chance.

Why am I Writing This?

There is a common story I tell everyone who is mildly interested in joining a design team. The gist of it is "Im so glad I did". But it's about time I write it up and share it with as many people as possible! I will take you briefly through my journey as a high school student up until I realized the insane value of being on UBC Solar. I hope to show you that applying to UBC Solar will be one the best things you can do at UBC; or at least, pique your interest to apply.

Also, don't get bothered by the length of the blog post. I promise I'll keep you interested.

Aside

Binge watch this 100M view series with Veritasium as your host. And its about Solar Car Racing 😱!

Why UBC Solar is the Place to Be

There is alot of points up next. But trust me they pack a punch.

• The best place to get ahead: Design teams are the ultimate kickstarter for engineering students. You gain hands-on technical skills, but also something even more valuable; mentorship and support from older students across different engineering disciplines. You learn how to navigate university, careers, and engineering much earlier and better than you otherwise would. It’s hard to overstate how much this accelerates your growth.

• Beyond the textbook: For science degrees, this is one of the only chances you will have to actually build something and see a tangible impact from your work. For business and arts students, you are working with a $150,000+ budget, securing partnerships with sponsors locally in BC and globally, and marketing a real, physical product that you can build and drive!

• Solar’s network is unmatched: Pulling late nights with incredibly driven peers, playing sports, or just chilling together. Plus, you tap into a massive alumni network of people who started exactly where you are and are places like SpaceX, Tesla, and many startups. 

• Experience is not a prerequisite: I joined university from zero. I didn't know what an Arduino was, bread boards and wires made no sense, and I never made anything physical. Now 82 of us design, build, and competitively race our Solar Powered Car against top universities from around the world. We are looking for curious and hard working people!

• Mentorship over uncertainty: It is always worth it to try out a design team. The incredible support network of upper-year engineering students will help offset the hours you put in, allowing you to step out of your comfort zone and build immense technical experience without sacrificing your academics.

• Real engineering from scratch: We build our solar cars completely from scratch and continuously iterate our designs for international competitions. You will get to build something tangible while meeting and learning from global solar car teams who are all competing for the exact same goal.

• Don't wait: My biggest mistake was letting fear of not handling academics + design team work keep me from applying in my first semester of my first year. Take the risk now! It also costs nothing to try and can be an opportunity of a lifetime. Just give it a shot!

Top Left to Bottom Right: Krishan Datta (BMS Lead), Jonah Lee (Simulation and Strategy Co-Lead), Jay Wen (Aeroshell Member), Robin Kang (Marketing Member). And they aren't even our registered drivers!

Below is a glance at some of my own fun times at Solar. This is a small dent in all the stories Solar members have to tell!

Post-competition brunch in Nashville with the team! (Left to Right: Saman Niksiar, Munro Anderson, Owen Tan, Aum Wagh, Chris Poovantana, Hemat Wander, Krishan Datta). I'm taking the picture. The Pecan tart was amazing. 

Electrical Leads Picture. (Left to Right: Evan Owens, Samuel Shin, Krishan Datta, Joshua Riefman, Jonah Lee, Michelle Hu). I'm sideways. This was not my idea (blame Krish)

Debugging why the Motor was not responding at 2025’s competition. (Left to Right: Evan Owens, Me, Michelle Hu, Tony Chen (Driver))

After we boothed at Everything Electric the team went to climb at Hive and eat BigWay after. (Top Left to Bottom Right: Chris Griffiths, Hemat Wander, William Bonnell, Me, Kaz Soda, Chris Poovantana, Aum Wagh, Deev Shah, Prisha Parikh, Michael Hui-Fumagalli, Nathan Ma)

1. The Illusion of the "Academics Only" Route

I want to take this back to the beginning to emphasize exactly how little you need to know coming into university to succeed later on.

In middle school, I got bad grades. I was just a kid who hadn't figured it out yet. By high school I did much better because a) I genuinely liked math, physics, and chemistry but b) so I could do better than my friends (just how I was then 😂). So, I aimed to do well in those courses. 

I never thought there was anything beyond doing well in school to get a job. That was just the environment I grew up in. Looking back at where I am now, my high school self would have been blown away to know that opportunities like design teams even existed. The idea of doing challenging things with like-minded friends and on a project with a real impact instead of your lab assignment!

Us changing firmware for the battery pack when test driving at Outlet Mall. The joy of solving problems with your close teammates and watching the car zip around felt like a mini version of competition! From left to right: Rifana Saleem Khan, Joshua Riefman, Krishan Datta, Tony Chen, ME, Chris Kalitin, Deev Shah, Hemat Wander.

2. The First-Year Mistake

When I got accepted into UBC, I didn't even apply for engineering initially. I applied for sciences because my family wanted me to become a doctor. At the last minute, I had a change of heart and switched to engineering. Not because of prestige or anything like that, but simply because I knew that I did not want to do medical school. I came in with no specific passion. I was a blank slate but I knew I was a strong worker and introspective. 

During frosh or orientation week, I first heard about design teams. But my orientation leader told me, "A design team is too much work. Don't do it.". 

That was a huge mistake. I listened and focused entirely on academics, and ended up spending spare time working alone on small personal projects. I assumed first year would be too difficult. However, you need to step out of your comfort zone and take risks. Even more so as a University student. And double that if you are a first year! You have nothing to lose, so much to gain, and time to grow! So, apply to a design team and apply to UBC Solar! The skills and friendships you build are a million times more valuable than anything you will build alone.

An example personal project on my website. I combined the left and right images to create the middle image using a pre-trained NN. Fun to make but nothing as impactful as the next picture for the team.

The culmination of telemetry firmware and software stack which enabled us to make data driven decisions such as driving speed and debug the car rapidly at competition.

3. Taking the Leap

By my second semester, I was desperate to get on a design team. I spammed applications everywhere because I felt behind my friends on UBC Launch Pad. I luckily got on AgroBot  and I was so grateful for that experience because the technical work I got to do and its application are nothing like what I am doing in personal projects. I left the team due to organizational changes I was unhappy with and I applied to many design teams including UBC Solar in September 2023.

I initially wanted to be on the strategy team at Solar because I loved math and computer science. I had absolutely zero hands-on electronic experience. Seeing design team applications ask about microcontrollers and Arduinos was the most intimidating thing in the world. And, it seemed like they actually expected you to know it? Because of this, we have changed Solar's applications to explain our intentions clearly. Why hide anything from people we want to talk to!

Despite that, on my first day I saw that I was on the Embedded Systems team. We started with an onboarding presentation by my lead, Ishan Joshi, who now works at SpaceX. I remember feeling so frustrated that I left Agrobot only to be in a worse situation. I had no interest in Embedded Systems! I have no idea what Embedded Systems even is. Yet I still showed up, worked to my expectations, and it ended up being the best thing that could have happened. 

That is the power of a design team: the sky is the limit. Whether you want to go to SpaceX, Tesla, build a startup, or create an organization with worldwide impact, a design team is the starting point and UBC Solar will accelerate that the best. Right now, you might not even know what you want. And that's the perfect reason to put yourself in a place where the sky is the limit. I know this because our team dedicates our work to making world-class engineers and leaders; it's actually our vision!

Team picture of us winning 1st place in the Altair Challenge at FSGP 2025!! Lets go Nathan, Winifred, and Owen!

Aside: Getting Rejected from a Design Team

I also applied to UBC Solar in January 2023 but got rejected. If you are in this position where you really want to join a design team, don’t give up. Ask for feedback (we will give you it!) and re-apply for the next term. 

4. When Theory Finally Becomes Reality

At first, I was given Python projects. They weren't directly applicable to the car, and I was still treating the team like a class with my old mindset. Design team was another assignment I needed to do. But I valued doing work fast, doing it well, staying curious, and pushing myself to do it better than my leads. 

But then I got a project with a bigger scope: re-hauling our telemetry system. Given my previous values, I just started messing around with the code.

Then came the turning point. About six months in, when I actually connected the telemetry system to our car and saw it actually work something changed. I was a bit excited and I posted a picture of it working to my leads who were asking me about it. Then, on top of my project working my Electrical Lead, Mischa Johal, compliments me! This subconsciously got me hooked on the cycle of designing, testing, and finding a bigger project. For another example, getting to debug our motor control system with our Electrical Lead was a massive eye-opener to me. It was when our motor spun for the first time that got me even more inspired to keep pushing and contribute more to the team. I got a taste of what 'real experience' is; its when you make something that works and other people are going to use it!

As soon as you join UBC Solar, our goal is to show you the environment and how things work in reality. Theoretical learning has no grounding until you see it in action. Once I saw the car working, I shifted away from schoolwork. My pace and interest in design team work skyrocketed. I realized how many opportunities I had missed by obsessing over school, and I threw myself into learning everything I could about the car.

5. The Real Value: The People and the Application

School is highly individual. Everything is just a theoretical assignment graded by a professor; it doesn't actually affect anybody.

At Solar I got help with course planning, knowing what to expect on exams, internship advice, and even general life decisions. There are shared resources, notes, and people who genuinely want to help you succeed and have succeeded themselves!

A design team is team-based and real-world. You are doing work that is immediately applicable to the industry. But more fundamentally, building real things changes how your brain processes information and spots opportunities.

Above all, it’s about the people. I wanted to stay up late through the night working on Solar projects because there were other people around and to learn from my mentors like Mischa Johal. Prepping the car for competition was incredibly exciting. Even when all I understood was half of a single PCB’s firmware, speed reading the code on the other PCB's to get the motor to run was a thrill.

Fast forward to 2025 when I first attended competition, I got to see the culmination of all my work and the rest of my teammates’. Aside from relentlessly fixing the car we spent time talking to other teams and learning tons from them. It was surprising to find no ego or gatekeeping involved. Just genuine conversations between your counterpart on another Solar Car team! I distinctly remember geeking about the electrical and telemetry system with Illinois’ Electrical Lead at the time (that’s where I got the idea for the new GPS module for those part of V4). 

When you take the chance to join a design team, I guarantee you will find at least 1 person like you. Having those friends makes you excited to show up every day, pushes you to do your best work, and inevitably makes you a much better person.

Take the chance. Apply to UBC Solar.

OG Team picture at the start of the year. Join us and make a difference!

Brightside's final driving day at Outlet Mall. One of our Alumni, Mischa Johal made it out as well. He also has a beautiful reflection on his time UBC Solar you should totally check out

Future Outlook

If you made it this far, I hope you are interested in joining UBC Solar. So, we will give a taste of what our team’s vision and long term roadmap is. If you remember the LIGHT SPEED series at the start of this blog post, the general idea is that our team will be racing in Australia at the World Solar Challenge in the next generation, On the global stage. 

Some of the amazing student made cars at the 2025 World Solar Challenge. They look alien!

Our Vision: To develop generations of world-class teams of engineers and leaders in sustainability, by building the world's most lightweight, efficient solar-powered vehicles.

Our Roadmap: Structured into distinct phases.

1. Learn and achieve World Solar Challenge (WSC) Standards with V4

2. Develop a WSC Worthy Car

3. Achieve First Place at the World Solar Challenge

4. Continuous Innovation

Point 3 is much easier said than done. However, this is the long term roadmap our team is on and we want more motivated people to join us on this journey! You won't know anything at the beginning but your time will be well spent being at UBC Solar.

Resources

I know you will probably still be interested in consuming more UBC Solar content. Reading first-hand accounts of anything is thrilling because you can genuinely resonate with the human experience. So, below are some more resources

• Mischa Johal (2023-2024 Electrical Director)'s Blog Post

• Saman Niksiar (2024-2025 Electrical Director)'s Competition Reflection

• More UBC Solar blog posts