EK works on the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle team (Photo Credit: Magali Gruet/USC)
Paul Ronney walks like a man who has too many things he’s excited to show you. He rounds a corner of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and pushes open a door, and suddenly you’re somewhere you were not expecting: a vast, humming space that smells faintly of metal shavings and warm resin, where students in safety glasses bend over machines at all hours, making things.
“This,” says Ronney, chair of the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, with the quiet satisfaction of someone unveiling a painting they love, “is the Baum Family Maker Space.”
A Donor, a Library, and a Vision
The Baum Family Maker Space didn’t always look like this. For years, AME students had nowhere to really build: no dedicated home for the welders, the machinists, the dreamers who needed to get their hands dirty. Then came Jim Baum.
The Baum family donated the money to transform what had been USC’s science and engineering library into the sprawling fabrication facility that stands today. “Because people don’t use books and journals in print anymore,” Ronney explains with a laugh, “that space became available.” The construction happened mostly during COVID, quietly taking shape while the campus was largely empty. When students returned, a new world was waiting for them.
Ronney is not shy about his gratitude. “Every time I see Jim at some event, I bow at his feet,” he jokes. “Before this, our Formula SAE team was working in some little chain-link-fenced area in a parking structure. It was not a place I would have taken visitors.”
Inside the Baum Family Maker Space (Photo Credit: Magali Gruet/USC)
Built for Undergrads, and Only Undergrads
Walk around the Baum Family Maker Space and one thing becomes clear: this place was built with a very specific audience in mind. Not a PhD candidate working on their dissertation. Not a master’s student analyzing simulation data. This place was built for the undergraduate student who needs to build something: for a class, for a competition team, or simply because they want to.
That’s not an accident. It was Jim Baum’s explicit wish. “The donors didn’t want it to become just another graduate lab with PhD students,” Ronney explains. “They wanted it to be for undergraduates.” Graduate students are generally directed to the professional machine shop in the basement of Olin Hall, where they can work with staff by the hour.
There is, however, one well-known loophole. “I always make sure I have some undergraduates working in my research lab,” Ronney confesses, “so that I have access to this space. It helps the research and it’s great experience for the students.”
The Baum Family Maker Space opens late and stays open late, until 10pm on weekdays. Not a bug, but a feature. Students are in class in the mornings. The real action starts in the afternoon and runs deep into the night.
Inside the Baum Family Maker Space (Photo Credit: Magali Gruet/USC)
Precision Machines and the People Who Run Them
Ronney moves through the space with the ease of someone who has given this tour many times, but whose enthusiasm has never once dimmed. He points to the rows of CNC milling machines, computer-controlled cutters that can take a block of raw metal and carve it into an intricate part with extraordinary precision. “This machine can basically take a block of material and make almost anything out of it.” His hands sketch the shape of something in the air.
Then he stops at the water jet cutter. Pure water, pressurized to an extreme and shot through a tiny nozzle, capable of slicing through steel like a warm knife through butter. Professional staff are on hand, and students must be trained before they can use it.
In the 3D printing wing, students are busy working on their next CAD file. Ronney picks up a feather-weight piece of carbon-fiber-reinforced composite and holds it out. “Try to break it,” he says. You try. You can’t.
3D printers in the Baum Family Maker Space (Photo Credit: Magali Gruet/USC)
In the back is a machine that stops most first-time visitors in their tracks: the Stratasys F900, one of the largest 3D printers at any university in the country. It can build parts up to three feet by three feet by two feet: not prototypes or trinkets, but functional, structural components. How did a university end up with a machine like this? Stratasys made the machine available to USC, and Ronney has a theory about why. “It’s what I call the ‘drug pusher business model,'” he says. “They say, ‘Hey, kid, first one’s free. Try it. It’s really good.’ They get you hooked, and when you go out into your career, you want to work on these machines because that’s what you know.
But the machines are just tools. The real magic happens when students use them.
Racecar Drivers, Robot Warriors, and a Sub That Thinks for Itself
The competition teams that call the Baum Family Maker Space home are the beating heart of the facility. Walking through, you pass the Formula SAE team’s area, where this year’s internal combustion racecar sits surrounded by laptops and scanning equipment. A student runs a handheld 3D scanner across the chassis while a colleague holds a tracking device; together, they’re capturing every curve and weld of the car so it can be fed into a computational structural mechanics model. “By using dynamic tracking, we can scan the whole chassis,” one of the students explains. The resulting digital model will be used for stress analysis, aerodynamic simulations, and the detailed engineering report that the judges will scrutinize as closely as they watch the race.
A student is scanning the chassis of the race car he is building with his team (Photo Credit: Magali Gruet/USC)
Competition day in May takes place on a flat track in Michigan, with no banked curves, which creates an engineering puzzle. “You can think of it as an aircraft wing in reverse,” Ronney explains, gesturing at the car’s aerodynamic body panels, made of foam sandwiched between layers of graphite-epoxy composite, so light you could lift it with one hand but rigid enough to withstand the forces of a sharp turn at speed. “You’re trying to generate downforce so you can make sharp turns. But of course, the more downforce you have, the more drag you have. What’s the trade-off?” It’s a question the students debate endlessly, because the answer could be the difference between victory and a second-place trophy.
There’s also an electric vehicle team, their car sitting nearby with its internal combustion engine replaced by an electric motor and battery pack, operating in a separate category under slightly different rules. And a short walk away, the BattleBots team’s robot sits casually on top of a cabinet, its spinning blade designed, very deliberately, to destroy other robots.
Then there is the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle team, whose sub (sleek, sealed, full of sensors) competes in a summer competition in Irvine. “You kind of just put it in the water and it has to do everything by itself,” says one team member, EK, who joined because he was drawn to the obscurity of the challenge. “Not a lot of people know about underwater robotics. And then it being autonomous makes it a lot harder.” He smiles. “So that’s why I am here.”
EK in the Baum Family Maker Space (Photo Credit: Magali Gruet/USC)
Participation in all of these teams is, crucially, entirely voluntary. When Ronney first became department chair, he floated the idea of making team membership a graduation requirement, but the faculty pushed back immediately. “At one of the competitions, the one where students build remote-controlled aircraft, some universities do make it a requirement,” one faculty member told him. “Those students? Some of them don’t want to be there. The plane crashes on the first flight. They throw it in the trash and leave.” Keeping it voluntary is better. The students who participate want to be here, and it shows.
The Value of Reliability
The trophies on the shelves of the Baum Family Maker Space each have a story, and Ronney knows them all. One of his favorites involves NASCAR. Starting in 2022, NASCAR built a temporary racetrack inside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for a special race. In the first year, the Formula SAE team was invited to take their car out for a lap on the track. In the second year, the stakes were raised: USC’s team would race directly against UCLA’s.
“The cars were about evenly matched,” Ronney admits. “But UCLA had quicker drivers.” A beat. “However.” He pauses for effect. “They broke down.” USC won. The trophy sits on the shelf. Every time Ronney walks past it, he sees not just a prize but a small perfect lesson: in engineering, sometimes your best asset isn’t speed. It’s reliability.
Paul Ronney describes the cars the students are building this year (Photo Credit: Magali Gruet/USC)
Photo Credit: Magali Gruet/USC
A Department’s Living Room
Technically, the Baum Family Maker Space is open to all undergraduate students at USC, not just AME students. In practice, Ronney estimates that the majority of the people using it on any given day are from his department. It’s the place where the curriculum becomes real, where the equations written in a lecture hall become metal parts, printed components, and race-ready machines.
“If you ask me what makes our undergraduate program different from our peers,” Ronney says, walking back toward the exit as the sounds of the Baum Family Maker Space fade behind him, “I would say it’s the depth and breadth of the hands-on experiences that they get.”
He pauses at the door and looks back at the space: the trophies, the machines, the students bent over their work under the bright lights.
“We build stuff,” he says simply. “We borrow a lot of the technologies that other engineering departments generate, then we take the last step: we build it, test it, improve it, and operate it.”
Published on February 20th, 2026
Last updated on February 20th, 2026