Women Behind the Scenes Series: Mika Ohkawa
In talks with some of the other female members at MUR, we delve into their experience of working with the team and gain insight on their takeaways from undertaking STEM streams. Our second interviewee is Tyre Specialist senior, Mika Ohkawa, who has been with the team for two years now commencing her role in 2018. She shared with us details about her role, obstacles, prospects and her word of advice to STEM aspirants.
MUR’s developments and forward-looking objectives are constantly transformed into a reality through great fervour and hard work of all its members. At MUR, contributions which are crucial for making necessary headway are recognized regardless of gender. Tyre Specialist senior, Mika Ohkawa, shares with us her takeaway of being a female member in the team for over two years now.
Mika began her journey with MUR in 2018, landing a spot on the team through a recruitment process that was, at the time, different to how MUR recruits talent. The process which has now become fairly formal - requiring potential candidates to undergo selection stages before they are handed a position - was once informal. It was on this premise that Mika took it upon herself to send out “insistent emails to the team lead”. Her enthusiasm got attention from the recruitment team and she was called in for a quick interview upon which she landed an immediate junior role with the club. When asked what drove those insistent emails, she said it was her ardent desire to “get into a workshop and build some real things”. Mika pointed out how MUR recognized this, “MUR has and hopefully always will reward enthusiasm.
After joining MUR, Mika recalls taking on her very first project and what this entailed. “My first project, as a junior, was the charge cart, a rolling cart with a dead man’s brake that held the accumulator and other components while the accumulator charged. By the end of my junior year I had spent quite some time with the suspension team, so I felt I had a head start at beginning of my senior role in 2019.” This goes to show that Mika’s early start played a great role in the impact she had on the team but also the skillset she took away with her gathered over the course of her two-year stint.
Apart from her works on the charge cart, Mika spent most of her time “supporting the team” in whatsoever manner she could prior to entering her senior year at the club in 2019. She gathered up a multitude of skills by working across a variety of tasks like “CAD, track days or giving an extra pair of hands in the workshop or eyes on a problem”.
Transitioning from a junior role to a senior one brought about some hiccups and greater undertaking of responsibility. Mika’s senior role involved working with the suspension team specializing on dynamic elements of the car like the tyres. For Mika, the biggest challenge was the sheer newness of her Tyre Specialist role. “The team had survived for years without it, the tyres always “worked”, so I had to figure out how I was going to make the new role worth it. When asked how she dealt with these challenges she said, “As with so many challenges in MUR, it just took research and time.”
While both her junior and senior projects revolved around tyres, the latter required much more detailed and sturdy work on the car. Mika informed us, “It involved a lot of tyre model development, so understanding what conditions your tyres need to be in and how that translates to design requirements for other systems. Once the car gets on track, it’s all about model refinement and suspension tuning: looking at wear patterns, heat distribution, drawing connections between car performance and tyre characteristics. Apart from her junior project on the charge cart and her role as a Tyre Specialist engineer in her senior year, Mika has been fortunate to get involved in other areas of the team’s developments which allowed her to get a taste of other areas of engineering. She expressed, “I was lucky enough to get into manufacturing, mostly welding and assembling suspension components.”
With her senior year at the brink of completion, Mika walks us back to where her passion for engineering first budded from. Having had already commenced her mechanical engineering degree in 2017, Mika felt her heart wasn’t in it and decided to switch over to Mechatronics. She said what worked for her was, “Keeping an open mind, being prepared to learn new things and switch fields if an opportunity comes along is more important than defining some kind of path.” Her mindset and approach towards future job prospects, however, is a little more thought out with a 5-year plan in the pipeline. She laid this out to us, “For now, I’m planning to stay in Australia for a few more years and work. Gain some industry experience before going on to get my Masters. I’ve found Control and Robotics wonderful, so I’ll probably keep moving in that direction.”
Mika says the one thing that she loves most about working on the team is, “The people. Working in FSAE is honestly a grueling process, but I have never worked with a more motivated and inspiring group of people before or since.” Mika’s story is an example of how female aspirants are making their mark in the STEM field and it also lends a spotlight on how individuals looking to get themselves involved with organizations like MUR can get their foot in the Motorsport industry. Her word of advice is “Probably the classic: go for it! Right now, you will absolutely get attention for being in this field, both negative and positive attention by the way, and the only way to make it normal is to get more women involved. So many organizations are embracing this culture, MUR especially was so supportive of me and now has more female members than I’ve ever seen.”
