• UC Davis HyperLoop team experience: Learned a lot during the team run by SpaceX. Before becoming president (controls programmer), attended the last HyperLoop competition in 2019 when SpaceX unceremoniously stopped responding to competition plans without canceling, leaving the team in a confusing situation. The winners were from the Technical University of Munich.
• Elon Musk's joke: At the award ceremony, Elon joked about the irony of results being in imperial units despite best teams using metric, and it was often non-American teams winning.
• Hard Tech Fund meeting: Attended a virtual meeting during COVID to raise money. Past HyperLoop winners like from Delft and Munich were there. A student from Munich asked why American teams lag behind. Mentioned funding differences like Munich's €500,000 budget vs. OneLoop's $2,400. Student asked why couldn't they get more funding. Revealed American teams were working part-time while other teams could take a semester off or reduce course load.
• Class vs. real life: In classes, there's a ceiling with an A or A+. Some get research or job offers but not for the author. Had one professor in cybersecurity but decided it wasn't for them. But in real life, there's no ceiling. For HyperLoop, taking a semester off to work on the team leads to great results. The author wishes this was more possible in US universities.