Winning the Inaugural DOE Battery Workforce Challenge: A Postmortem

In May 2024, the Mines/Arapahoe Community College team won the inaugural DOE Battery Workforce Challenge, beating Ohio State, the University of Alabama, and nine other collegiate teams. Year 2 (2024-25), we finished 4th nationally with a stronger team and a more mature project.

I have been asked frequently what we did differently. The honest answer is that the standings tell less of the story than people think. Here is the postmortem.

The setup

The Battery Workforce Challenge (BWC) is a three-year DOE/Stellantis-sponsored competition where collegiate teams design, build, test, and integrate an advanced EV battery into a future Stellantis vehicle. Twelve teams compete each year. The competition combines engineering deliverables (battery pack design, cell-level analysis, thermal modeling), project management deliverables (Gantt charts, risk registers, gate reviews), and a physical build that has to pass safety inspection and competition driving events.

Mines paired with Arapahoe Community College, which is structurally important. ACC contributed manufacturing technology students alongside our engineering students. The team learned to operate as a real cross-functional industrial team, not a single-school engineering club.

The faculty side was Prof. Polina Brodsky and me, with Polina as Co-PI and me as Lead PI. Total program value across three years was $255,100 (DOE/Stellantis base grant, Chevron sponsorship, student travel stipends, competition prizes).

What worked in Year 1

1. We picked five students and let them run

The Year 1 leadership team was small. Five students, two graduate and three undergraduate, all of whom had to commit a full year to the project. We did not try to scale the team to “give everyone a chance.” The students who joined committed to weekly meetings, biweekly deliverables, and competition travel without being chased.

Smaller, accountable teams beat larger, dispersed teams in time-boxed competitions. This is a structural finding, not a cultural one. The BWC deliverable cadence assumes a small team that owns full deliverables. A team of 25 students dividing work into 25 pieces does not produce a coherent battery pack design; it produces 25 disconnected work packets.

2. We separated technical risk from project management risk

Polina and I divided faculty advising along a clean line. She owned the technical-risk register (cell selection, thermal modeling, safety review). I owned the project-management-risk register (deliverable schedule, travel logistics, budget). When the team ran into a problem, they knew which faculty member to bring it to. We did not duplicate effort.

This sounds obvious. It is not how most faculty teams operate. Most faculty co-advisors collapse into a “we both look at everything” model that produces slower decisions and unclear ownership.

3. We treated the cross-school partnership as a feature, not a hassle

Working with ACC required building relationships at a different institution with different cultures, schedules, and assessment expectations. We invested time in those relationships from day one. The ACC students were not “subcontractors” on the manufacturing side; they were full team members with full decision authority on manufacturing questions. When their faculty advisor (also Polina, recognized with the BWC Outstanding Faculty Award that year) made a call, it stuck.

Cross-institutional teams are usually weaker than single-institution teams because of the operational tax. We made it work because we treated ACC as a peer institution with distinct expertise, not a junior partner.

4. We let students lose at the right moments

A piece of conventional faculty wisdom is to protect student teams from public failure. We did not do that. When Year 1 deliverables were going to miss intermediate gates, we let them miss those gates and let the team feel the consequence. By the final competition, the team had learned to read its own progress accurately because they had felt the cost of misreading it earlier.

This is not cruelty. It is calibration. A student team that does not know what failing a gate feels like cannot accurately predict its own deliverables.

What was different in Year 2

Year 2 produced a stronger technical artifact and a 4th-place finish. Three things contributed.

1. The team grew

We expanded from five students to about twelve. Some of the operational efficiency we had in Year 1 was lost. Communication overhead grew faster than productive output. This is not always avoidable (multi-year competitions inherit team members from prior years) but it is real.

2. The competition got harder

Other teams learned from Year 1. Ohio State in particular came back significantly stronger. Our absolute performance improved; our relative ranking dropped. Both things are true and both matter.

3. We had less novel insight to deploy

A year of building a battery pack with our specific OEM partner and our specific cell chemistry produced returns. Year 2, we did not have a corresponding step change. The marginal improvements were real but smaller.

The 4th-place finish is, in many ways, a more honest reflection of where we are as a program than the 1st-place finish was. First place required a confluence of small team, fresh problem, and competitor inexperience. Fourth place came from a normalized field where we are competing on sustained execution.

What this means for other faculty considering BWC or similar

If you are thinking about taking on a multi-year DOE Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition (AVTC) program, including the new EcoCAR Innovation Challenge that we are now also leading at Mines, here is what I would tell you:

1. Start small. The temptation to give 30 students “a chance” will produce worse outcomes for everyone.
2. Divide faculty advising along a clean line. Decide who owns technical risk and who owns operational risk before the year starts.
3. Partner with a different kind of institution. A peer engineering school is less valuable than a partner with complementary expertise (community college, design school, business school).
4. Build the team’s failure tolerance early. They have to know what missing a gate feels like before the gates start counting.
5. Plan for relative ranking to drop in Year 2. Other teams learn. Be prepared for stakeholders who treat 1st place as the floor.

The full BWC program value at Mines was $255,100 across three years, plus significant in-kind value from software (GT-Suite, Siemens), hardware (Analog Devices, Dana), and a vehicle donation from Stellantis (Dodge RAM ProMaster Van). The DOE EcoCAR Innovation Challenge that we are now also leading is approximately $520K over four years beginning Fall 2026. The same lessons will apply.

If you are running or considering an AVTC program, reach out. I am happy to share the project plans, gate review templates, and budget structures we use.