When Baja SAE members tried to access the Ford Prototyping Lab after hours at the end of the second week of Fall Quarter, their card access was denied, McCormick senior Ryan Kelly said.
Last academic year, the shop was open to any NU student from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. However, trained students were granted 24/7 after-hours key-card access to specific spaces, according to Kelly, a Segal Design Institute shop manager and manufacturing lead of Baja SAE.
The change came after Joe Kuechel, the former operations director of the shop, was laid off in July. He was responsible for handling after-hours access for club members, according to Kelly.
After talks between engineering clubs and NU administration, after-hours shop access was reinstated Oct. 17, McCormick Prof. Greg Holderfield, the executive director of the Segal Design Institute, confirmed in an email to the Daily.
On July 29, Northwestern announced that NU would reduce the budget attributable to staff, resulting in layoffs — including Kuechel.
“The reaction was pretty immediate,” said Ezra Danzig, a McCormick senior and Segal shop manager. “Why is this suddenly implemented? When will we have access back? Will we have access back? All of these questions were shared among a lot of the clubs. I think the thing to know is, these clubs are a huge part of why people come to McCormick.”
In an email to The Daily, Senior Associate Dean Richard Lueptow wrote that the restructuring of the shop’s support team led to a review of after-hour access policies by the leadership team. Lueptow wrote the policies were reassessed to ensure student safety, after which conversations were held with engineering teams regarding prototyping needs.
“Our student project teams are a critical part of our student life, and we are happy to have worked with them to update our after-hours policies to both meet the needs of our student teams and ensure that all work is done with sufficient safety measures in place,” Lueptow wrote.
By the third week of Fall Quarter, Baja SAE, Formula Racing, NUsolar, NUSTARS and NU Robotics Club sent statements to Holderfield, then to Lueptow. The statements stressed the importance of after-hours access for each club, explaining why it would be harmful to the shop, the school and the student population to take away around-the-clock access.
Danzig added that the shop becomes busier and more dangerous without after-hours access, as clubs must work while other students are using the machines.
“It means machining is going to happen faster, more sloppily, with less care,” Danzig said.
During early October, Lueptow set up meetings with representatives from each of the five teams to understand the importance of the shop to engineering clubs.
A later meeting with Holderfield and the shop managers was held to discuss after-hours access, Kelly said.
McCormick and Segal administration determined that club teams now have after-hours extended access from 8 p.m. to 12 a.m. seven days a week to the lathes, milling machines, CNC machines and laser cutters.
“(The administration) decided to keep the existing solution with a little more oversight, a little bit more documentation, because none of (the administrators) knew what the current policies were because that had all been handled by (Kuechell) before he was laid off this summer, and so with (Kuechell’s) absence, none of administration really knew what the deal was with our team access, with late night access in the shop,” Kelly said.
McCormick senior and Baja SAE project manager Lochlan McGinnis said he was satisfied with the hours and agreed with the midnight cut-off, noting that nothing productive would come out of being in the shop after midnight.
However, some students said they felt the effects of losing after-hours access the last few weeks.
“From my perspective, it felt very slow because four weeks is half of our training, usually,” said McCormick sophomore Jillian Tabak, the Baja SAE recruitment and training lead. “I understand in terms of Northwestern’s bureaucracy, that is pretty fast, but in terms of the club speed and how the clubs need to progress, that was slow because we wouldn’t hear an update for a whole week, and we wouldn’t know if we were going to be able to have a training this week.”
Danzig emphasized that Kuechel’s layoff left a communication vacuum between engineering teams, student trainers, shop professionals and NU administration.
Since Kuechel’s layoff was effective immediately, Kelly said there was no time for him to disseminate knowledge to anyone.
The rules and expectations on after-hours access sent to engineering clubs were nearly identical to the understanding clubs already had last year, Kelly said, but because this was previously handled by Kuechel, there were no official documents formally outlining procedures.
While the timeline for training new engineering club members has been affected by changing the hours and faculty at Segal, some students are empathetic.
There were a lot of offices involved, and these processes take time, Danzig said.
“As much as the student body moves very quickly in terms of their responses to things, I think we can have a little bit of the grace for the fact that the directors were in a really tough position and honestly, four weeks is a pretty quick turnaround for anything to happen at the university scale,” Danzig said.
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