Women Behind the Scenes Series: Michelle Keane
We interviewed some of the female members at MUR to gather their experience with the team and for them to shed light on their STEM streams. One of our first interviewees is Velocity Estimation Specialist, Michelle Keane, who has been with the team since the beginning of 2020 shared her insight on her role, challenges, aspirations and most importantly her advice to STEM aspirants.
MUR’s success is synonymous with the members that comprise the team. And of the many, Michelle Keane is one integral member who has contributed to the club’s progress towards building autonomous cars. Working within the Spatial and Perception subteam as a Velocity Estimation specialist, Michelle has been with the team for 6 months ever since she joined MUR from the onset of 2020. As usual, recruitment process commences a few months prior and it was towards the end of 2019, that the team was scouting for additional mechatronic engineers to meet with the scope of autonomous developments. The search process was made fairly simple to the recruiters as Michelle was already a familiar face to the integration team. Furthermore, her major of study in Mechatronics added another promising factor to her profile. With the opportunity to complete her capstone program with MUR Motorsports and an internal recommendation in front of her, she ended up applying and the team was delighted to have her on board.
Having been inducted directly into a senior role, Michelle admits she felt overwhelmed due to the steep learning curve of her role, “It’s because you’re working with people who really understand the car and you are starting from square one.” However, it didn’t come in the way of finding her rhythm, “It’s just a matter of researching, asking questions, and just really getting involved so that you learn all of this as you go.” Today, her other responsibilities involve taking care of Junior projects, offering them direction and advice and assisting on club event days. She works alongside E car electric engineers in discussing how the team can build an autonomous future from their 20E car. An aspect of performing her daily responsibilities involves the helping hand she receives from some of her colleagues, “The E car electric engineers also have a lot of experience in sensors which helps me greatly.”
As part of MUR’s overall developments, every subteam and member is assigned a project. Michelle had been assigned the Vehicle state estimation project which works on MUR’s autonomous cars entailing collection of data on the car’s current state such as its position, velocity, and orientation. “Once gathered, it can be processed and fed to the other localization and mapping systems, as well as the control systems so that the current state is known and can be worked out to deliver the desirable outcome,” she shared.
Having worked with MUR Motorsports for over six months now, Michelle went on to share aspects of working at MUR that she values most dearly. “Hands on industry-style experience and training is one. You are learning new things almost every day. The best of all is working with a capable team, everyone is really switched on, enthusiastic and always happy to help. You get that experience of being in a large team while also communicating and managing effectively prior to putting yourself in the job field. You benefit from your time at MUR with friendly connections and a full-fledged professional network which prepares you for your future prospects.”
Despite having only a handful of female members in the team, MUR values contributions of each and every member equally. Her advice to getting involved with STEM clubs is “You just have to put yourself out there”. She aims to go further professionally with plans to enter into the field of robotics or perhaps even go down the medical route working with devices like pacemakers and prosthetics. “Besides MUR, you’ll find that gender does make a difference in how people treat you in a underrepresented field like STEM, but if you’re passionate about it then you’ll find, especially in later years of your university degree that sooner or later all of that disappears completely. MUR has been very inclusive and there’s never been even any comments towards gender, you just feel like one big team family thing of sleep deprived students that are over enthusiastic about learning about these systems, and it’s really good to be a part of such a close knit team with common interests as well.”
To young female aspirants wishing to join MUR or gain experience in the STEM field, she advices “These clubs and teams seem to typically be inclusive regardless and you will gain so much experience through them that I really recommend giving it a go, I actually wish I had joined MUR sooner in my degree.”
