Dylan Godinez

That came from my dad. He was all kinds of crazy about NASCAR back in the early 2000’s. I remember watching races on TV with him and I thought it was cool. It burned gas and went fast. I always wanted to be a part of it. He took me to my first race. He reached an age where, financially, he wasn't able to give himself a career in racing, but he wanted to try to set me up the best he could. So he and my mom did everything that they could to help me get through school and put me in front of the right people. And they both helped me out a great deal with working toward what I wanted to do.

It was always a possibility. I knew I wanted to end up working with cars. I was very good at engineering from a young age. My parents noticed my skills playing with Legos as a kid. And they would see these structures that I would build with Minecraft and how I understood how things went together. It was geometry to me. I was really good with geometry and simple mathematics. They saw what I was able to do with my mind and create these structures. I just wanted to get into something with automotive. Even though there are so many different kinds of engineering, I knew about race cars and road cars, so I wanted to do some kind of engineering with them.

We're basically performance fabrication. We don't really do just one thing, but we do specialize in land speed racing. We've converted anything from NASCAR Cup cars to straight-up rat rods. We take a car off the street and modify it to do a high-speed pass. We just made the Roadsters, which were a ground-up build, starting with just the body.

We’re working on a Streamliner project right now that's going to attempt 400 miles per hour at Bonneville. That project isn't expected to be done until this coming summer. Usually, I'll come in and get right to work using SolidWorks. So, I'll do some drawings or some modeling. Half the time it'll be little projects. We have all kinds of stuff going on. Sometimes the fab shop will be doing something on the car, and we'll need a new bracket. So, I'll design it and we'll either get it laser cut down the street, or we'll cut it here and put it on the car on the same day. Our turnaround is really, really quick.

I'm getting to do what I went to school for. I was worried when I chose something with design, I thought I was going to have to take what I could get with my first job. I thought it could be just sweeping the floors and maybe I’d get to approve a drawing here or there. But I'm right into it. Drawings that I make are right out the door the next day. And a part comes in after that. There's no sense of wasted time. There's no feeling that what I did at Penn College was wasted. It all went toward something. And it was very quick from graduating in May to having a job two months later. It was an unmatched feeling. It was really cool.

Almost every day. It’s not just what I did with the program itself. Everything else helped me, like taking machining classes and Mastercam classes. I was really glad that when I was at Penn College, I didn't  just take whatever electives sounded fun. I made sure to take electives that involved my major. Like when you make a design, it doesn't just go out into nothingness. You need to be able to understand machine processes, manufacturability, how a factory works, how stuff gets done outside your company's walls. It helps me day-to-day knowing all that stuff.

Ever since I was a little kid, I always wanted to be a race car driver. As I got older, I thought that probability was small, but not impossible. I decided to focus on something realistic. I thought, what about an engineer for a race team? And I was following all of these companies that were doing stuff in the automotive world. The Garage Shop has broken a lot of records and broken a lot of molds for what has seemed to be, you know, a regular in the industry. I came across a post on Instagram they made, and it had SolidWorks in it. I got a SolidWorks certification at Penn College and figured maybe they needed help. I reached out and was on a plane later that week. It was all pretty quick. And it started with following their account on social media.

I’ll stay as long as they'll have me. That's for sure. I definitely like coming to work every day. When you find something that you like to do, you don't dread coming into work because even on a slow day, you're going to learn something.