In Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Contests, Students’ Main Goal Is Scoring a Job

Ben Lippolis flew across the country to take part in a student hyperloop competition hosted by Elon Musk. This was no science fair. At the Space Exploration Technologies Corp. headquarters on the outskirts of Los Angeles, engineers from some of the world’s top universities loaded 2,000-pound hunks of metal onto a tubular track and, one by one, raced their pods to see who could clock the fastest speed.

Lippolis, a recent graduate of Northeastern University, teamed up with some classmates and students from Canada’s Memorial University of Newfoundland to form team Paradigm. They’ve been toiling away to construct a passenger train that can travel at high speeds inside an enclosed tube, as envisioned by Musk. To fund their project, including air travel, accommodations, parts, machinery and transport for the pod, they cobbled together grants from the Canadian government and corporate donors.