Jamie Clark wasn’t always interested in the automotive industry, but his participation in Challenge X during his senior year at Penn State University sparked his curiosity and ultimately led to his job today.
“I had a desire to work on something that would make the world a more efficient or cleaner place,” said Clark, who currently works at Johnson Controls Automotive as a system engineer.
His main role on the Penn State Advanced Vehicle Team was to work in the battery group, where, among other responsibilities, Clark had to package the battery system, determine where it would fit in the vehicle and devise a way to keep it cool.
He believes his experience in Challenge X contributed to his first job at Tesla Motors working as a mechanical engineer.
“There was definitely a lot of company contact during Challenge X, not only with General Motors, but also with the other companies that helped support the competition,” Clark said.
He always had a desire to work abroad and his dreams became realized when he moved to Germany for his current position at Johnson Controls Automotive. While he didn’t speak German at the time, batteries are a more specialized area of the automotive industry, and his expertise made him more marketable to German employers.
Today, he primarily works on battery modeling to determine how the battery interacts with the all aspects of a vehicle’s software and hardware during design validation testing.
