Could you please introduce yourself, including where you are from, the year you graduated EngSci and a quick history of your career and experiences since then?
My name is Cameron Robertson. I was born in Toronto – actually in Scarborough – but I grew up in the Philadelphia area in the USA before coming back to Toronto for school. I graduated EngSci in 0T8, and then I graduated with my master’s in 0T9 also from U of T, in the Institute of Aerospace Studies. Since graduating I’ve worked on a number of interesting human-powered projects.
Initially I worked on the human-powered ornithopter, which a team led by Todd Reichert and I had built while at the University of Toronto, and then finished and flew successfully shortly thereafter in 2009. It was the world’s first successful piloted flapping-wing aircraft. Then we founded Aerovelo and led a team to build the Atlas human-powered helicopter, which captured the 30-year-old Sikorsky prize for the first successful flight of a human-powered helicopter. That was in 2013. Then, in 2016 Aerovelo set the human-powered land speed record with the Eta speed bike. Ultimately, 89.59mph is the current speed that that vehicle holds. In between I was also working at a small company in Brampton called Brican, building one of Canada’s first domestic UAVs. It was all electric and designed for natural resources, environmental and wildlife applications, as well as some defense applications. So, there was a mix of human-powered and electric airplanes in the early days.
Since 2015, I’ve been at Kitty Hawk in Mountain View, California, working on vertical takeoff and landing (or eVTOL) vehicles, and in particular on the Flyer project. It’s an electric multicopter designed for one passenger, and it’s supposed to be the most accessible and easy to fly aircraft ever built. I’ve been working both in mechanical and hardware engineering and structures, as well as various managerial and director roles in engineering and flight-test. And now I’m working on a new R&D project at Kitty Hawk.
How was your initial transition from high school to Engineering Science? What were your first year impressions of EngSci and U of T?
The transition was pretty challenging for me. I had been at a good high school in the US, and I had taken all of the Advanced Placement college/university level courses that I could. But, obviously, the level of academic rigor, responsibility and demand was very high in Engineering Science. Among my earliest impressions were that I felt everybody in the class was smarter than me. People were very dedicated and brilliant in general. I thought that I was going to have a very hard time; fortunately I did not pay too much attention to where in the class I actually lay in terms of marks as time went on. People were also very outgoing and interesting, and so it was great to meet a lot of people to make new friends. Those were some of the most important parts of the transition: realizing that everybody was so smart, but also that everyone was amazing and wonderful.
How did your feelings at the start of first year compare to your feelings at the end of first year, about being surrounded by individuals who you perceived to be so smart?
In high school I felt that study was a lot more independent, actually – whereas in Engineering Science, I think the friends you make and their level of intelligence as you kind of gang together meant that for us it was a lot more codependent. We did a lot more work together, and I think that helped us all make it through. It’s like the old adage: “You want to work with people who are smarter than you.” I think that really pulled up my own level of academic rigor and effort, and I think I got a lot more out of the program, because I was lucky to be surrounded by very smart, very kind people who again were very sharing and very patient. Not to say that I was a dummy or anything, but being around so many great people helped me strive harder.
You and Todd Reichert originally developed the idea to build the Snowbird Ornithopter while playing rugby at U of T. How would you recommend students aim to split their time in terms of studying, extracurricular activities, and life? What was your strategy for this in university?
Todd and I had a lot of social overlap, and it was during practice at the intramural engineering rugby team that Todd first mentioned the ornithopter. I basically overheard that he was wanting to build this human-powered ornithopter, and I said that I would be interested in hearing more and getting involved. It was very lucky and one of those happenstance occurrences where you’re in an environment and you’re near people and you kind of collide. Funny enough, that probably changed the trajectory of my life (to be fair, maybe also Todd’s). We talk a lot about how we developed our own codependence as we worked on a lot of these projects. As far as generalized “how I would recommend people split their time,” as I say, I was not the most academic student. I think that in general, Engineering Science was really focused on making sure the academics and the learning program and the coursework was really well-conceived, well-executed and as effective for book-learning and real academic knowledge as it could be. My approach – not just because I was lazy, but also because I wanted variety – was almost to do the minimum coursework I could to achieve an acceptable result. That was still doing well in the realm of passing and taking away everything I think was really intended from the academic work, but almost all of my other time was split between either intramural rugby, the other EAA sports, social events with the SkuleTM community. As far as hobbies I did sports like skiing and sailing with family. Furthermore, as Todd and I were talking about the snowbird project, that ended up absorbing a lot of my free time over the next 2-3 years of undergraduate and master’s. I think that the academic work was really important and set a good foundation, but arguably it was the work outside of the classroom that had the biggest impact on my ultimate trajectory. The short answer would be: I did enough academics to achieve what I internally deemed an acceptable result, and besides that I tried to fill life with everything else that I could.
What was your favourite course in the formative years of the program? Did you have a least favourite course or subject?
I think one of my first, and maybe this is a common thread, was CIV102. That was a lot of people’s favourite, because it’s very hands-on, there’s a lot of historical context, which I loved, and there’s materials and structures, which is something that stayed with me for a long time. Most of my work in the subsequent decade was composite structures and analysis. And the experience in that course between the labs and the projects and some of the experimental work that was done was super interesting. So, that was definitely my favourite in first year, and maybe over years 1 and 2. In Year 2 Engineering Design was also very powerful, super hands-on, and had a lot of really great experimentation and collaborative working. A lot of people say that the Engineering Design class is hard and it definitely can be, but I actually wanted to spend as much time on that class as I could because it was all the things that I loved doing. I was in the electro-mechanical discipline. The only one that stands out as a really “not great” experience from first year was Linear Algebra, which is probably the case again for a lot of students. Gabe D’Eleuterio taught my last lecture, and I just squeaked by in that course. In my whole university career, that was the one that I came closest to failing. In the last lecture he said, “Well, the good news is, most of you will never have to touch this subject again.” And I breathed a sigh of relief and thought, “Oh, thank god.” And then he said, “However, those of you who go into Aerospace will see this all the time.” And at that point I was already pretty set on Aerospace so I was like, “Oh, dear.” That was interesting. It was not hard for the quality of the teachers, it was just not a subject I got really well. It was very high level math.
Non-academically speaking, what do you think was the biggest thing you learned from Engineering Science?
I don’t think it’s bad for university students to hear, but basically I think I’ve been very pragmatic as an engineer since graduation. I think that the foundation and the learning to learn in Engineering Science is really important. Kind of, “How do you come up to speed on a subject very quickly.” Since university, I probably haven’t used a lot of the particular details or elements of the coursework or very specific knowledge that we got in those four years. But, as I’ve had to learn new subjects, become an expert very quickly in a new discipline or work in a new space, learning to learn at a very high level is something that stuck with me. You have to learn very quickly to sink or swim, as in swim rather than sink in EngSci. That’s the most lasting capability that I took away.
You spent a university summer as an apprentice carpenter, which came back to you in a big way when you were working on building the Snowbird Ornithopter and the Atlas human-powered helicopter. What skills that are not explicitly engineering skills do you think have made a big impact on your career? What skills that are not explicitly engineering skills would you recommend student engineers try to learn or improve?
In that particular experience it was very hands-on, and it’s like woodworking – putting parts of houses together, building things and working with a number of other disciplines like people doing drywall and people doing electrical. I thought that it was really good to learn how a whole project comes together from conception through execution, with many interrelated parts. But hands on work I think, similar to what we see in second year design and the fourth year aircraft design class, was something that I always sought more of and that really helped in the Snowbird days and with Atlas and Eta. Basically, for each of those three vehicles which did something the world thought was impossible, a lot of it was design, but a lot of it was about actually making a very high performance vehicle. They were very specific prototypes and very niche, but even so, they had to be of a high quality and well-executed. That capability to put things together with your hands is valuable – but as you do that more and more both in design and in stuff as simple as carpentry, it also helps your engineering tuition. So if I’m designing a structure or designing an airplane or integrating an electric motor or something, having a sense of what the right answer should be. It’s just like what Collins says in CIV102: “To find the answer you must know the answer.” It’s no less important as you go into very precise disciplines like computational fluid dynamics or finite element analysis, where you still need to have an intuition and ways of checking whether the answer that you’ve got out of a very intricate and precise analysis package is anywhere near right. So, again, I think that hands-on capability and that intuition are two skills that you get outside of the classroom but that are foundational to a successful engineering design capability.
It seems like you have created your own opportunity in a lot of ways throughout your engineering career. Generally, what advice would you give to students who want to find better and more competitive opportunities in internships, summer jobs, research positions or design teams?
There are a few things. Find the things that you’re really interested in. Search your soul and see what excites you, and if it’s academics and more research-ey things, that’s excellent. For me it was stuff outside the classroom. Then, pursue the opportunities that take you in that direction, so that your skills and your interests are what you really accentuate and grow. So:
- Identify your strengths and interests
- Own and work on those, increase your capability and expertise
- Use those to differentiate yourself and to figure out how to provide value
It’s a great recipe for success and also for being happy throughout your academics and throughout your career. It’s the third step, the differentiator, that you execute on to a degree. There are an infinite number of legitimate outlets that can have an impact not only on your career and your resume, but even at a young age, on the world at large. I think that the things to actively do at a university are to go find those opportunities or make them yourself. Think about differentiation and adding value. I waited until the beginning of my third year to really do that. That’s where Todd and I started the ornithopter project. I focused a lot on academics the first two years. And I think that going forward in your career, it’s really those differentiators and the extracurriculars, and the value that you add, and the internships that you have, and the practical skills that you came away with, that differentiate you on your resume. I think that’s what sets you up for success, either working at very interesting companies once you graduate or starting your own company. If you want to do a startup, the people funding and supporting you want to know that you’ve done very interesting things.
When you decided to pursue the Ornithopter project, you chose to create your own team and pursue your own goal instead of joining a pre-established group. How did you make this decision specifically? What pulled you in this direction?
I think partially with getting involved in the ornithopter project or the human powered vehicles team, it was that Todd and I ended up having good chemistry. I also had a group of friends who were interested; a lot of my roommates ended up joining the project. I had a little exposure to Formula SAE and Solar Car, and thought maybe these are not the teams for me. It also seemed well enough supported, in EngSoc for example, to start up your own team and to do your own thing. So, because we had put together a project and a goal that seemed really well-aligned with our interests, and the conditions for success and the right conditions for pursuing it were already there, it didn’t seem like a big impediment to go do our own thing at that point. It seemed like a really attractive opportunity that was totally feasible. And, that “can you do it” capability was fostered in EngSci to a degree. Fundamentally, there was an interesting idea, and there weren’t many obstacles to pursuing it.
Finally, what is one thing you would tell yourself if you were starting your undergraduate degree in EngSci this year?
I think I would have started on that “1, 2, 3 step process” earlier. We get a lot of time to decide our major, but I think that a lot of people come in thinking there’s a direction they want to go and some passions that align. Thinking about diversifying and getting experience outside the classroom from an even earlier stage would be really smart. Come in at year one and get involved elsewhere, start building community, and build outside experience. That’s the number one thing that I would say. Bring the experience that I went and pursued in year two further forward. There’s this idea of “I know you’re just starting. Year 1 and 2 are really intense. But shift the balance towards more focus outside the classroom even earlier.” I understand that had I been neck-deep in Solar Car in Year 3 instead of rugby, I might not have picked up that opportunity with Todd, but I think in general not everyone has a snowbird human-powered ornithopter that comes along.