Michigan Tech students are no strangers to the Enterprise Program, working in teams with like-minded students to provide services to real clients. With over 25 different teams, the Enterprise Program is a large part of the Huskies’ college experience. With this approach that feels much more like a business than a classroom, the same challenges that businesses face begin to bear down on students.
One of these challenges is tariffs, and Enterprise teams are seeing the effects play out in real time. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce defines a tariff as “a tax on imported goods paid by the U.S. business or individual receiving those goods at their port of entry.”
Benji Sutton, a fifth-year Computer Science major, has been with his Enterprise team for three years. The Multiplanet Innovation Enterprise, known as MINE, seeks to design, test, and implement robotic technologies for extracting and using local resources, construction, and characterization in extreme environments, such as lunar, martian, and flooded subterranean environments on Earth. Sutton works as a part of the software team, Rover Autonomy and Networking (RAN), to ensure that the brain and eyes of the rover are operational and ready for deployment. When asked about the effects of tariffs on his team, Sutton states, “I’m not sure the exact numbers, but MINE has certainly been affected in one way or another. We are ordering robotics, circuit boards, and so on, which usually comes from across the sea, and that’s been heavily impacted.”
Tariffs aren’t the only thing to affect the Enterprise Program at Michigan Tech. The Aeronautics and Rocketry Enterprise (AERE) has been impacted by the war in Ukraine. Brendan Schwartz, a third-year Mechanical Engineering major, serves as the Chief Engineer of High Powered Rocketry. Schwartz says, “Most high-powered rocket motors that are used on the rockets of our size have been shipped to Ukraine to make missiles for their effort. This means that most of the commercial rocket motors that we aimed to buy are already used up.”
Creating solutions to real-world problems means identifying how these global issues impact the Enterprise Program specifically, and taking steps to work around setbacks in order to keep the program running. The Enterprises at Michigan Tech are working to combat complications and to continue their services.
