Student showcase

Craig Shannon

Craig Shannon is Team Leader for an international competition called Formula SAE at the University of Auckland.

Craig was raised in New Plymouth and Pukekohe and went to Spotswood College and Pukekohe High. While at Spotswood College he attended the National Science and technology fair in 1999. He has been on the Young Achievers database since that time. He graduated High school in 2002 and spent a year as an AFS exchange student in Costa Rica, which he says was an amazing experience.

He is now in his third year of four at the University of Auckland studying mechanical engineering.

The Formula SAE competition involves university teams throughout the world designing and constructing a formula style open wheel race car each year, which so far has provided students with invaluable experience in design, marketing and management.  The University of Auckland is the only New Zealand team to compete in Formula-SAE to date, and this year will be the third occasion at the competition.

Craig first started working on Formula SAE half way through his first year and has been involved ever since. The team normally has about 30 engineers working on the project and is completely student run. They have now produced two competition cars that have been purely funded by sponsors.

Craig has learnt a lot from the project over the last two years and already this year have learned a lot about the real world from experiences as a manager from dealing with sponsors, suppliers and human resource people. This year as team leader he is in charge of organizing and coordinating the team. Part of this is organizing and arranging to attend two competition events. In the middle of the year they want to go to the England competition and then the Australasian competition at the end of the year

In the future Craig would like to go overseas while he is still young and to work and travel with a WRC team for a while.

For more information about the project go to www.FSAE.co.nz