A Mission of Civic Engagement

Silverdome. Success initially was modest as the students and faculty learned more about the competition. In 2001, the SVSU team finished 51st out of 125 international teams, earning its best ranking (15th) in the design category. From there the team dramatically improved. In 2002, it finished sixth overall and once again did well in the design category, ranking higher than any other team from Michigan. The team placed in the top 10 again in 2005, ranking well in various engineering categories. In 2008, the team finished 14th overall at the Michigan Motor Speedway and recorded the fastest acceleration time in the world. It was the first time that an SVSU team finished first in judged categories.39

The most important success was opportunities it provided the students. The team finished well in 2005, partly because of its third place finish in presentation and marketing. That illustrated the interdisciplinary nature of the race team, which incorporated students from the College of Business and Management. The following year, the newly appointed and first-ever Dow Entrepreneur in Residence, Ken Kousky, also provided assistance, demonstrating a further cross-college involvement.

Many engineering graduates have gone on to careers in the automotive industry, some of them in high profile positions. For example, Allen Hart, a 2005 alumnus and SAE Formula Race Car team member, credits his experience with the Formula SAE race team for landing a job with the prestigious Penske Racing. Hart was a member of Ryan Newman’s team that won the 2008 Daytona 500 and also worked as the data engineer for Sam Hornish’s NASCAR team.40

A Mission of Civic Engagement

Many students participate in leadership initiatives related to academic courses. Consider Julie Keil’s moot court curriculum, which the lecturer of political science introduced to her courses in 2010. The students enjoyed it so much, they took the initiative to seek funding to send teams to the regional moot court competition in Worcester, Ohio. There, the team of Stuart Chipman and Joe Chrysler earned second place, allowing them to advance to the national competition in New Orleans. Chipman finished 14th in the nation. Of his achievement, Chipman said that “on a résumé, it’s invaluable. Every law school has a moot court team and having prior experience makes me a serious prospect for recruitment.” Chrysler returned to the national competition in 2011, winning the individual oration competition. Keil said the moot court experience has helped prepare interested students for law school and demonstrated for all who participated that they could compete successfully with students from select liberal arts colleges and the large research universities.41

The same was true for the department’s Model United Nations team. More than 100 students participated between 2007 and 2012. At the 2011 American Model United Nations Conference in Chicago, the SVSU team earned many awards, including recognition as the best overall delegation for its representation of the Russian Federation. Political Science students engaged in other extracurricular activities such as editing their own academic journal, The Sovereign, and creating a student-led initiative to inform and register area high school students to vote.42

In 2006, the Department of Political Science established the Center for Public Policy & Service, which aimed to make SVSU “the recognized regional hub for political and public

Stu Chipman, 2011, B.A. (sociology and Spanish majors), completed his second year of law school before spending the summer of 2013 in an “externship” position with the Chicago-based law firm of Schiff-Hardin LLP. He was the firm’s only 2013 summer associate selected for their Ann Arbor office. “My liberal arts education at SVSU really helped me feel competitive in every way with the people here [U of M] from schools like Harvard and Yale,” Chipman said. “In no small part, I got the job [law firm externship] based on my credentials from SVSU. Being able to say in an interview, ‘No, I didn’t sign up for that—I created that,’ has taken me a long way.”