Committees
Four committees. You join one.
Two are client-facing advisory practices. The other two run the club's research and its events.
Open to every Penn undergraduate.
At a glance
One year, one committee.
Committee 01
Consulting advisory
Strategy and operations work for aerospace and defense companies.
One scoped deliverable a semester.
Teams take a real question from a real company and return an answer that someone will act on. The scope is set so a semester is genuinely enough, which means the question is narrow and the answer has to be specific.
Most of the difficulty is not analysis. It is deciding what the client actually needs, saying so plainly, and defending it when the room pushes back.
You would
- Scope a question with a client
- Build the analysis
- Present it and defend it
Committee 02
Financial advisory
Valuation, market sizing, and capital markets work.
Primes, suppliers, and launch.
The distinctive feature of aerospace and defense as a sector is that the customer is often a government, the contracts run for decades, and the political cycle is shorter than the product cycle. A model that ignores any of those three is wrong.
Members build a view on one company or one segment, put a number on it, and take it to the room. The room's job is to attack it.
Committee 03
Research, sustainability, and innovation
Collegiate competitions and original work.
Competition entries and original research.
This committee enters collegiate competitions and does original work on clean aviation and the infrastructure aircraft depend on. It is the part of the club with the longest time horizon and the most room to propose something nobody asked for.
In 2022 a six-student team took NASA's Most Intriguing Concept award in Gateways to Blue Skies for a modular, carbon-negative airport, and presented to the Las Vegas Airport Strategic Planning Committee.
Committee 04
Conference
Programming, speakers, and events.
Speakers, and the annual conference.
This committee supports the annual Wharton Aerospace Conference and runs the club's own events on campus, including fireside chats with people running companies in the sector.
It is the most outward-facing work in the club. You decide who is worth hearing from, you get them in a room, and you are the one holding the microphone.
Applying
Committees admit by application, in the fall and the spring.
Open to every Penn undergraduate.
Standing facts
No engineering background required.