Robots and Electric Cars: A Career in Engineering

During the spring of his senior year at RWU, John Babuka ’20 was chosen from 12,000 applicants to work as a Systems Engineer at General Motors in Warren, MI. 

Working three days from home and two days at the office, Babuka is contributing to a feature that will be in the Hummer EV, a new electric pickup truck. He also tests hardware for digital keys. He is in a track program that will allow him to rotate through different projects as he learns more about the company. 

“I am surprised how welcoming General Motors was. They did a lot of trainings for us and offer a lot more trainings for the future to help better yourself personally and professionally,” said Babuka. 

Babuka’s senior design project, designing a pizza delivery robot, prepared him for his work. 

“The senior design project really taught me the whole design process from beginning to end. I am applying the skills I learned: defining the problem, figuring out what is needed to do, what is the issue to solve, figuring out how to solve it, and doing it,” he said. 

Babuka’s role on his senior design team was designing a charging system for the pizza delivery robot. The robot ran off of a car battery, which was very similar to what he sees in the vehicles at General Motors. 
Beyond the physical aspects of the project, just having the experience of teamwork and collaboration helped Babuka land his position. 

“It is so beneficial to have professors I can easily access. Since it’s a smaller school, I am able to know all my classmates and really learn together with them," he said. "I learned how to learn as a group, learn with people, work through issues, and work together with them. In every job interview they ask, ‘How do you work with people?’”