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Jake Gates

Jake Gates

Controls Engineer at JLG Industries (an Oshkosh Corporation company) and University of Michigan Baja SAE racing alum who transitioned from student competition to a professional engineering career.

Sep 17, 2026

23:24
And that was
23:26
one thing that translated really well.
23:27
So something I think that I've looked at as kind of a secondary thought in Baja was for the design presentations, kind of building out the DRB and having design matrices for every decision you make.
23:38
I often treated that as an afterthought of, okay, I really consider only two ideas, but let me throw a couple extra ideas and give some extra thought to it.
23:45
But a lot of things that I'm working on on my team are kind of like the cutting edge in terms of software technology for at least our company, but I think a lot of it for the industry as well.
23:55
And so sometimes we're trying to decide, well, we have these 10 different paths and we're not necessarily an expert in how you design a cloud or how you integrate like these like iot devices onto older construction machines and so i think a lot of times sitting down taking a beat and drawing up like design matrices for these 10 or 12 different paths we have helps us to narrow down and know that the path that we're moving towards or the project we've decided to kind of bring to the customer is the best version that can be and i think that's something that Yeah, you probably do in classes through your different design projects, but something that I maybe didn't take as seriously in Baja, but has been very beneficial in the projects I work on today.

18 MINS LATER

42:57
I love seeing the capability that you guys have at JLGU.
43:01
Yeah, so I'll speak kind of what Todd was saying, too, about like removing or and even Zach was saying about removing kind of the user from the application or the job being done.

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