Over the past four years, the Wentz Engineering Program at Kent has evolved and flourished, embodying the critical and creative thinking that aligns with the school’s mission. Engineering Program Director Carlos Bezerra says the department has been gradually working to reposition engineering within the academic structure as a core discipline that requires study, theoretical understanding, and application. “We emphasize that engineering involves both making things and understanding how and why things work,” Bezerra says. “This helps students connect what they’re learning to the real-world impact.”

Dr. Ben Nadire, Kent’s first engineering program director, led the efforts to introduce engineering to Kent, which was titled “pre-engineering.” Initially, the program was conceived as an introduction for students exploring engineering as a potential college major. It offered STEM electives and occasional lectures.

Hands-on learning took center stage first under former faculty member Ryan Harris and later under Bezerra’s leadership. The program now boasts a robust curriculum, a competitive solar car team, a range of innovative capstone projects, and fascinating field trips. Students can also pursue an Advanced Studies Diploma in Engineering.

Like the engineering process itself, Bezerra says this program’s development started with small-scale efforts and tangible outcomes. And much of it has been student-driven. “It’s the students’ involvement and commitment that is leading the way and helping us get more recognition at Kent,” he says.  

Kevin MacNeil, academic dean and math faculty, says the program meets a rising demand in education: preparing students to think critically and creatively.

“Engineering students are doing real work and solving real problems, and that’s what colleges want to see,” MacNeil says. “They’re less focused on whether students arrive with an encyclopedia of knowledge, and more interested in what students can do, how they think. In that sense, the engineering program fits perfectly into the direction education is moving.”

The Holy Solars: Building More Than A Car

The Solar Car Challenge is the cornerstone of Kent’s engineering program. Founded in 1993, the national STEM competition tasks students with designing and building solar-powered cars over a 14-month period, culminating in a race against other high school teams at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth.

Kent’s team, the Holy Solars, first competed in 2021 and won first place in the Classic Division. “The project has become deeply meaningful because of its complexity and authenticity,” Bezerra says. “It is, arguably, the most ambitious engineering challenge we can offer at the high school level. It reflects the multifaceted nature of engineering—design, planning, teamwork, problem-solving, creativity, communication, and innovation—all embodied in a single, large-scale project.”

This July, the team—now 12 students strong, up from four in its inaugural year—competed in the Advanced Division. Entering this division meant designing a high-aerodynamic body using carbon fiber, a material more commonly found in college-level engineering builds. “This year we had to make things we’d never made before,” Bezerra says. “I handed the students a book and encouraged them to begin researching other sources. And then I watched them figure it out, and they began teaching me.”

While the learning curve was steep, Bezerra says the “experiential component of engineering is a great teacher, and the problems teach us how to solve them.” He adds a favorite quote often attributed to philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.”

The challenge also pushed the team to adopt new digital tools, including Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software from the Autodesk suite, which allowed students to simulate wind tunnel effects. After designing a 3D model, they ran aerodynamic simulations to optimize performance. 

Jolie Malo ’26, a Holy Solars team member, says the experience taught technical and mechanical skills, along with confidence, teamwork, and resilience. When shipping delays jeopardized their build, the team improvised workarounds—even during scrutineering on the final day of inspection. “Without resilience, our team would have never made it through half the challenges we faced,” Malo says. “The Solar Car Challenge transforms theoretical learning into real-world experience because when our car hits the track, it needs to work.”

In Fort Worth, the team also faced a major electrical failure that sidelined the car for nearly three race days and affected all core systems, requiring urgent, real-time problem-solving.

Shaun Neary ’25, who is studying mechanical engineering at Union College this fall, reflects on the experience.

“The hands-on aspect of the Solar Car Challenge has improved my problem-solving skills immensely,” he says. “And working with a team allowed me to build my leadership skills, as I would guide my teammates so that we could succeed with such a challenging task.”

A Curriculum Built for Problem-Solvers

Bezerra attributes the engineering program’s success, in part, to the meaningful capstone projects available to students. “These projects are not about building for the sake of building,” he says. “Engineering is intentional at its core.”

Beyond the Solar Car Challenge, other initiatives include NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge, which tasks students with building a sophisticated pedal-powered rover for simulation of planetary exploration. With renewed interest, the program is also reintroducing robotics, specifically through the FIRST Robotics Competition.

In the classroom, students tackle smaller, curriculum-aligned projects that help them build foundational skills. In aerospace engineering, for example, they design and build gliders—a simple illustration of “how difficult it is to realize in practice what theory predicts with relative ease,” Bezerra says. In Engineering Principles, students explore both machine elements and structural systems, constructing a cardboard tower and the design of a structure in Autodesk Revit, which includes heat load calculations. Students in Digital Electronics learn the fundamentals of digital circuits through the “Birthday Project.”

“These classroom experiences help students develop an engineering mindset, which is a systematic approach to addressing challenges,” Bezerra says. In many ways, engineering at Kent exemplifies the school’s mission in action. The program cultivates self-reliance through hands-on problem-solving, embraces simplicity through efficient, elegant design, and promotes directness of purpose by challenging students to work collaboratively toward tangible goals that serve a greater good.

For Academic Dean Kevin MacNeil, these mission-driven outcomes are especially evident in the way engineering develops students’ character and mindset. “As students develop the kinds of capacities like self-reliance, they gain greater agency, autonomy, and influence in the world around them,” he says. “These were once considered ‘soft skills,’ but those of us in education now recognize them as essential.” He continues, “The people in the ‘next world’—colleges, employers, institutions—are telling us these skills are significant. They want us to send them students who possess these abilities, attitudes, and values.”

Malo sees those same values come to life through hands-on experience in the Solar Car Challenge. “Students learn at Solar Car that the simplest of designs will sometimes work best,” she explains. “We also learn what it means to work with a purpose. Yes, we have the desire to win first place in the race, but the team knows its purpose is to build a better car each year through teamwork and innovation. And finally, students are taught that self-reliance is key.”

Bringing Innovation to the Heart of Campus

As the engineering program has grown, so has the need for it to be more physically central to Kent’s core landscape. To fully integrate engineering with the rest of the academic community, Kent’s senior leadership is considering plans to relocate the program from a building off-campus into the heart of the academic campus.

“As the conversation developed, and as interest in the program continued to grow, it became clear that it deserved to be foregrounded architecturally—reflecting its increasing academic significance and impact,” MacNeil says. “It’s still in the ideation phase, but if it comes to fruition, its status as a marquee offering within the school will be sustained.”

The School has engaged architecture firm Ziger|Snead, based out of Baltimore, who conducted a conceptual review of the lower level of the Schoolhouse.

“That conceptual review led us quickly to the conclusion that this is great space for engineering,” Cataldo says. “It’s centrally located and visible to many, and it can be renovated, upgraded, and retrofitted. It also fits the size and flexibility needs of the program, both in terms of space and the type of equipment and furnishings we can bring in.”

As momentum continues, Cataldo says the school is considering how to raise the funds for the project. “We believe strongly that a project like this—one that’s so deeply student-centered—should be supported by those who care about enriching the student experience,” he says.

Bezerra says a central location will help students see engineering as a whole, combining classroom learning, activities, and capstone projects in a challenge-based environment. It will also raise the program’s profile. “It’s about making engineering and the accomplishments we’ve made more visible,” he says. “And not just for prospective students, but also for our community. Engineering can and should be integrated into a liberal arts education.”

Real Tools for the Real World

An engineering background opens doors far beyond expected careers. “Engineering education, in many ways, functions like a highly desirable passport,” Bezerra says. “It’s not just for future engineers.”

Some engineers go on to careers in law, tackling technical areas such as patent litigation or environmental regulation. The analytical and problem-solving skills developed through engineering are highly transferable.

“Students who are not going into engineering are deciding that they want to be involved in one of our engineering projects,” he says. “They recognize the opportunity to expand their learning experience and to be a part of a group.”

In fact, Bezerra sees an engineering education as essential for students today. “I believe high school students should graduate with at least some exposure to different technologies and be aware of how engineering will tremendously affect our society in this century.” In this year’s upcoming Aerospace Engineering class, students will research how commercial aviation will evolve over the next 30 years. “Even skills on a smaller level, such as learning how to use simple tools, maintaining a positive mindset to repair something, or achieving a practical sense of how things work, are extremely valuable forms of applied knowledge,” he says.  

He likes to imagine students walking around their neighborhoods and observing houses and identifying structural elements such as beams and columns, or noticing machine elements in home appliances, or understanding vehicle specifications—power and torque—when shopping for their first car. That’s when knowledge becomes meaningful. “That relevance—making learning visible in the world around them—is what sustains motivation,” he says. “When education remains purely abstract for too long, students may lose focus and interest. But when they can see its direct application, their motivation to continue learning grows.”