Q&A: Wyatt Pena, From Student to Sponsor
Graduating in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in engineering management, Wyatt Pena is already back supporting the next generation of engineers. He serves as director of operations at Ridgetop Group, an engineering firm providing products and technology for aerospace, defense, transportation, energy and industrial applications. Ridgetop has worked with several universities to sponsor research projects, internships and other collaborations. The most recent academic year, 2021-2022, was the first that the company sponsored an Interdisciplinary Capstone project with the UA.
Tell us about the capstone project you did when you were a student.
My capstone project was sponsored by Caterpillar Inc. shortly after they made Tucson their new regional headquarters. The scope of my team’s project was to design and develop a ruggedized multifrequency antenna mast system (AMS) for Caterpillar’s 793F large mining truck. Our mentor was Steve Larimore, who was the lead instructor for the capstone program this past year. With Steve’s guidance and support and the invaluable course structure of the capstone program, my team and I successfully designed, developed and tested a prototype implementation of a lightweight and retractable AMS. Our solution was safe, cost-effective, and was designed to enable more robust communication of GPS information, multifrequency radios, and critical telemetry data for Caterpillar’s large mining trucks that are in service worldwide.
Did your experience in the capstone program prepare you for your career?
The program did an outstanding job at preparing me for my career here at Ridgetop. And it also allowed me to utilize my past experience and knowledge about the mining industry after growing up in a small mining town and conducting multiple summer internships at a local copper mine. There are so many skills and lessons I learned from the capstone project and my courses within the Systems and Industrial Engineering Department that are directly transferrable to industry. Perhaps the most utilized skills I learned are related to the systems engineering design process, and how the “V-model” can be a highly effective project management tool to lead a team of multidisciplined engineers through an entire project/product lifecycle from concept to deployment.