Engineering club homeless at Drexel

Drexel University is renovating one of its lab buildings at 31st and Market streets with the goal of creating new space for freshman labs and an "innovation studio for designing and making new products."

But a byproduct of that effort has left homeless a student engineering club that builds a race car for competition each year, and its members are none too happy.

Hunter Hall, president of Drexel Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers), wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper, criticizing the administration for putting into "storage" his club and several others.

"It's pretty irresponsible for a university to demolish something when it doesn't have a place to put the people that it's displacing," Hall, 19, a third-year mechanical engineering major from Elkton, Md., said in a telephone interview. "I don't think moving people into storage should have even been an option."

Niki Gianakaris, a Drexel spokeswoman, acknowledged the club was placed in storage, as the university continues a spate of building and renovation projects under President John A. Fry.

"We are still reviewing the situation and looking for other options," she said.

It wasn't the first time the engineering club was displaced. Last year, it was moved out of the university's Hess Research Laboratories building, which was demolished to make way for Lancaster Square, a combined retail and living space. Within six months, the club got itself fully situated at 3101 Market Street only to learn that it would be displaced again come July, Hall said.

And this time, the club would become essentially homeless.

"We said we need a space if we are even going to have a chance of having a car next year," Hall said.

But the school year opened, and the students still have no working space.

Club members are operating out of a small office in Curtis Hall on loan from one of their advisers. It's big enough to fit three computers and hold discussions, but forget about hands-on work.

"We don't have space to actually physically build a car," Hall said.

Which is the primary purpose of the club. Each year, club members design and build a race car which then is sent into competition.

This is no fun and frill club either. Students say the experience is an integral part of their education at Drexel.

"It probably helped me get the job I have now," said Evan Dimmerling, 27, a 2012 Drexel graduate from North Wales, who works as a movable bridge engineer for a Doylestown consulting and engineering firm. "There's nothing on par in terms of the level of detail, the level of immersion you can get."

Barring new space, the club this year will have to send its designs off to a company for building, which will cost several thousand dollars, Hall said. Meanwhile, the club's machines, welding tables, chemicals and other materials used in the building process are setting in storage containers in a warehouse in South Philadelphia, he said.

Hall said he's disappointed in Drexel's actions.

"It just really seems like they don't care about us at all," he said.

"Why should we as students continue to perform research and participate in clubs flaunting Drexel's name, when, in actuality, they are only making it more difficult to do so?" Hall wrote in his op-ed. "Why should we support a school with our hard work and money that does nothing more than move us downstairs into storage?"