Some career counselors say that what you do for fun might be the thing you ought to do for a living. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that a group of students have formed a club dedicated to the engineering side of roller coasters and other amusement park rides. The Cornell Theme Park Engineering Group, formed early this semester, got off to a good start by winning a prize in the first annual Ryerson T.H.R.I.L.L. Invitational Design Competition, Oct. 30-Nov. 1 at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Members are not all engineers, according to club president Ronnie Forster, M.E. ’17. There are also students in urban studies and applied economics and management. But all are dedicated riders of coasters and other amusement park rides, he said, and some are considering careers in the industry. Forster himself is planning to do a co-op program with Premier Rides, a major roller coaster builder owned by  Jim Seay ‘84. Premier Rides actively recruits from Cornell and has several Cornell graduates on staff. Seay reported, 'We are excited at Premier Rides to hear about the Cornell Theme Park Engineering Group and we have been impressed by its accomplishments," he said. "Cornell University has and will continue to be a great resource for Premier Rides to add new talent to our globally focused organization.'"

In the Ryerson competition, sponsored by the Ryerson Thrill Club and judged by industry experts, student groups from Cornell, Drexel University in Philadelphia and the Universities of Guelph and Waterloo in Ontario competed in three categories. The first was to design a coaster inspired by the RAF Spitfire fighter plane; the Cornellians designed a coaster whose cars are mounted as “wings” spreading beyond the track so passengers ride with nothing beneath them.

The second challenge was to create a modification to the classic carousel. The Cornell proposal was a ride that preserves and greatly increases the up and down and around motion, but with “spaceship” cars instead of horses, and outer space lighting effects.

Cornell took first place in the third category, the Academic Curriculum Challenge, which asked students to demonstrate the connections they perceive between what they learn in the classroom and what they’ve experienced in the amusement world. They created a hypothetical curriculum for a college major in theme park engineering, combining existing Cornell courses and new courses they invented. The plan offered concentrations in park management, ride design, design analysis, structural engineering and systems engineering, giving students a solid grounding in engineering that could be applied in many other fields.

The win was a bonus, because the group had little time to prepare. They had only learned about the event about a week before it happened, Forster said. They ended up presenting their entries virtually, via Skype. Those attending in person were taken on a tour of Canada’s Wonderland in Toronto, currently closed, for an inside look at how everything works. The Cornell group plans to organize its own field trip to a park this spring, and the students are hoping to host a competition at Cornell similar to Ryerson’s but with a focus on overall theme park design.

Meanwhile, the students volunteer with EYES (Encouraging Young Engineers and Scientists), a program of the Cornell Public Service Center, to present lessons on roller coaster physics in Ithaca elementary schools.