Building Careers Beyond Classrooms to Mars

­In the basement of the Wyman Park Building lies room 41, the hub of one of Johns Hopkins’ newest student groups, the Hopkinauts Mars Rover Team.

Since forming in fall 2023, the group has sought to compete in the University Rover Challenge (URC), an annual global competition for college students to build the next generation of Mars rovers. The rover must complete four missions over diverse terrain, like tracking physical markers to drive itself around a course and analyzing collected dirt samples. Every year, more than one hundred teams apply with a video and written report, hoping to be one of the 36 finalists selected to compete in Utah.

Selected or not, the group gives budding scientists and engineers a chance to turn their classroom knowledge into practical career skills, according to the team’s co-founder and former president, Kyungmo Choi, Engr ’25.

“I truly believe that education is not just about learning from classes,” he says. “It extends to student groups where you spend more time thinking about what you have learned in ways you never thought about in class. That’s where skills develop into your own.”

Kyungmo joined some student groups in his freshman and sophomore year, but ultimately wanted a more robotics-focused one that didn’t exist then. That led him and his classmates, Claire Borden, Engr ’25, and Nicholas Watson, Engr ’25, to discover the University Rover Challenge. In addition to robotics work, this competition would require mechanical, electrical, biochemical, software, and business sub-teams, which the trio saw as a valuable way to collaborate with other majors.

“How I talk to Kyungmo about a mechanical engineering project is very different than how I talk to a biochemical teammate because they don’t have the same experience,” Borden says. “So, we’re all able to become more well-rounded, which I think is helpful for classes and when we get jobs.”

Watson agrees and adds that joining the group aligned well with his goals of designing space mission instruments.

“Naturally, being in a space-related club has helped me start understanding how that field works,” he says. “And I’ve poured plenty of hours into designing and analyzing our parts. That amount of manufacturing experience has really built up the skills I could use in my career.”

Despite the benefits, starting a student group comes with its challenges. Groups must recruit and retain members and secure funding for equipment, all difficult tasks without much physical progress, Borden says. After their first year researching and designing the rover, the team had plans to show at the Hopkins’ Student Involvement Fair and to apply for departmental and corporate grants.

Success varied until one day, the group received an email from the Whiting School about its Student Group Challenge, a fundraising campaign for the school’s student-led organizations. The Mars Rover Team became one of six featured groups and received nearly $3,500 from a mix of donors including alumni, parents, faculty, staff, and friends.

“We were able to immediately use those funds to start building because we had already done our research,” Borden says. “That helped us be more competitive for grants.”

Since then, the team has built the rover’s base and wheels, a science module to analyze collected soil, and a mechanical arm prototype as well as developed software for the rover to drive autonomously. As a few students graduate, including Choi, Borden, and Watson, the remaining team members plan to build on these advancements to hopefully compete in the 2026 URC finals.

As for the co-founders, they look forward to growing from their rover-building experience as they prepare for graduate school. For Choi, in particular, his time on the team inspired him to pursue a career in research and development for robotics.

“Building the rover, we had to start everything from scratch,” he says. “I really enjoyed that aspect of learning about different products and choosing the best options for us.”