USU Grads Shooting for the Stars

With Utah State University commencement just around the corner, launch time is approaching for some 3,500 seniors. And at least three USU scholars are totally fine with that.

They’re so good with it, in fact, that they dreamed up a space cruise to capture the imaginations of the crème de la crème of day dreamers: Walt Disney’s Imagineers.

Their ingenuity earned them a third-place finish among hundreds of college students across the nation earlier this year at the 21st annual Walt Disney Imagineering ImagiNations Design Competition, and a chance for eventual employment with Disney.

All three have already accepted prestigious offers from Disney to work as interns — no small feat when you consider the stiff competition for these much sought-after openings.

It all boiled down to 21 students from six universities who were announced by Disney as finalists in January. The USU dream team included Jason Cooper, Adam Dambrink and Philip LeGoubin. The other five universities represented: California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Carnegie Mellon University; North Carolina State University; Savannah College of Art & Design; and University of California, Berkeley.

The finalist teams were awarded trips to Imagineering in Glendale, Calif., in early February, where they presented their projects to Imagineering executives, met with technical and creative Imagineers, received behind-the-scenes tours and interviewed for the paid internships.

For the three USU fantasists, it was one small step from their Town Car onto the Imagineer’s campus, but one giant leap toward their prospective careers. One could tell that the Pixie Dust had settled between their toes and there was no washing it out now.

It was the giant week of networking with some of the best minds in the business that was the highlight of the trip, Cooper said. He will be interning as a landscape architect for Disney in Glendale, California.

The three students already imagined themselves working at Disney, so sitting down in casual conversation with the creators of Space Mountain and the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror seemed like the next natural step. It was an exhilarating one too.

The students said they loved mingling with the Imagineers, people who work in a surprising variety of disciplines from concept through construction. These are the creative minds behind all Disney theme parks, resorts, attractions, cruise ships, real estate development and regional entertainment venues worldwide. The Imagineering name combines imagination with engineering.

During their five-day stay, LeGoubin said they knew they were being graded, but it was done in a relaxing and casual manner. The students were walking among the giants but weren’t made to feel small.

“There was no such thing as a bad idea, just ideas that are too expensive or are not currently possible,” LeGoubin said.

He will be interning with Disney’s Blue Sky department of Imagineering.

Yes, Disney executives were interested in their college accomplishments, but they seemed equally curious about what made these students tick and what they liked to do in their spare time.

“They want to know how you think and wanted to make sure you can think like they think,” Dambrink said.

He will be working with Disney’s civil engineers at one of its new parks this summer.

The Disney challenge for this year’s competition focused on the moon. Contestants were asked to project themselves 1,000 years into the future. The human race is finally living on the moon and Walt Disney Imagineering wants to be the first to provide entertainment and recreation to the new lunar citizens. Contestants were challenged to imagine what this new Disney experience could be.

Cooper, Dambrink and LeGoubin envisioned stir-crazy moon inhabitants antsy to tour the galaxy. Their hunch: if you’ve seen one moon crater, you’ve seen them all. 

“In 3011, moon residents are isolated in a few colonies located on the moon’s surface and the exhilaration of living in their lunar quarters has begun to fade,” the USU team wrote in its project overview.

What these weary lunar homesteaders can really use is a cruise to Uranus and fortunately for them Disney has just launched a Galactic Cruise Line, “The Oneiro,” that allows residents not only to momentarily escape their new reality, as the students describe in the overview, but to explore with their own eyes what was once the exclusive view of satellites sent into space. It amounts to a seven-star resort with the thrill of space exploration.

By the time you read about the craft and the grand experiences in store for its 14,000 guests and glance through the colorful and detailed iterations of the cruise line offerings, you’re ready to lay down whatever precious lunar legal tender is necessary in order to hop onto the glorious galactic gallivanting space hotel. It comes complete with ingenious ringed living quarters that allow rooms to easily adjust to accommodate guest gravity preferences.

There’s a zero gravity sports arena, an Infinity Pool (think of a loop) for swimming with dolphins, a floating planetary bonsai, a Cosmic Gallery shopping mall, zero gravity dining with floating servers and verdant gardens. And the view? Oh my! Every living quarter is bestowed with ample picture windows that transform guest rooms into personal observatories enabling not only a birds-eye view of Orion’s Belt but his buckle too.

For those who can’t wait for 3011 to come around, they can only hope that these young imagineers might somehow convince Disney executives to turn the plans into a new park attraction. While the projects and concepts presented are not necessarily intended to be built by Disney, it is a way for the entrants to demonstrate their skills and creative abilities. And since all submissions become the sole property of Walt Disney Imagineering, you never know.

It is within this sphere of limitless possibilities that these USU achievers operate. They display a wide-eyed awe that is far from Mickey Mouse. You sense that they found the Wardrobe and have been to Narnia and back. You take them seriously. They know things.

“We saw a lot of things we can’t talk about because they are going to put them in the parks,” Dambrink said.

Maybe it’s as close to holding the key to the Magic Kingdom as they will ever get, but the longer you hang with them the more convinced you are that whatever it is they are dreaming up, it will eventually come to pass.

The plausibility factor is actually an important element. If whatever they imagine is not technically sound in some present or future form, it counts against them. That is why the two landscape architects, Dambrink and Cooper, turned to LeGoubin, a mechanical and aerospace engineering department student, for help. They could design dreamy layouts but needed to make sure they were grounded in reality.

“One of the things Disney wanted was to make sure that whatever we came up with was technically feasible,” LeGoubin said. “I did a bunch of research and interpolated it out to see what we could potentially work with 1,000 years from now.”

These USU dreamers are smart guys who had lots of great colleges to choose from. All three said they settled on USU because of its prestigious mechanical engineering and landscape architecture programs and the low tuition.

“We don’t think that just because we attend USU instead of say, M.I. T., that we are at all disadvantaged,” LeGoubin said. “And, I’m not in debt.”

He said too much emphasis can be placed on a university’s name when ultimately a university is really what you make of it.

“The thing is, a name doesn’t give you any experiences,” LeGoubin said. “It’s what you do at the university that gives you the experience.”

And what these three students did they hope other students will want to do as well in the years ahead. A university setting is ideal for students testing the bounds of imagination. It proved invaluable for the dream team that received unwavering support and guidance from their mentor Elizabeth Tofte, adjunct instructor in USU’s Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning department.

“She put in a tremendous amount of effort to help us succeed in this competition,” Cooper said. “We could not have asked for a better mentor. She was with us every step of the way.”

Also with them were dozens of peers who sat in on two practice presentations providing brutally honest feedback.

“Our project wouldn’t have been 10 percent of what it is had we done it on our own,” Dambrink said. 

It’s that spirit of collaboration across different disciplines and backgrounds that Disney has honed. Walt Disney Imagineers apply the same criteria to the student entries as they do their own work, namely: an ability to demonstrate respect and inclusion for the diverse array of families who visit Walt Disney parks and resorts. The Magic Kingdom’s presence on maps the world around indicates that Disney and his Imagineers must have got it right.

“Now we are hoping to keep USU on the map with Disney,” LeGoubin said.

Related links:

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

Walt Disney Imagineering Imaginations Design Competition

Contact and writer: John DeVilbiss, (435) 797-1358; john.devilbiss@usu.edu