Sitting down with student leaders about the ins & outs of student organizations. This edition we interviewed Juan Segarra, a senior mechanical engineering major from Eagle Motorsports.

Q: How did you get involved with with Eagle Motorsports?

Segarra: I started off working in the research lab with diesel engines and pretty much I just saw these guys working in the shop and was like ‘oh that is cool’ and I just moseyed in here one day and they were like ‘hey you get to work’ and I said okay. I just kind of jumped into it, and they had a competition I think two weeks after my first day in here. I mean I came in once and left and came in maybe two more times before they went to the competition and when I saw that they were leaving for the competition I said ‘I want to go’ and jumped in the truck and the rest is history I guess.

Q: What exactly does your team do?

Segarra: We design and build two racecars every year. One is an on-road, Formula style car and one is an off-road, trophy truck style racecar; it’s like a dune buggy type thing. They are two different organizations, they are both put on my the Society of Engineers, and that is basically the governing body for everything automotive. They put on all sorts of different types of competitions for people to enter. We choose to compete in the Formula and Baja Sae competitions.

Q: This is only your second year in Eagle Motorsports. You pretty much went straight from being a new member to being president. Was that overwhelming?

Segarra: Not so much because I was so involved with it since I started. For the last year and a half or year and a quarter, I have been here just about every day except for maybe a month so I am just really, really involved with it. I am always here to see what is going on, and I have my hands in everything, or at least I try to, so I learned a lot in a very short period of time. I am pretty ambitious. I really wanted to do it. I wanted to be president and captain of the formula team.