By Menachem Wecker
Anita Davidson’s team is one of the last standing in an international competition created to inspire a new generation of super fuel-efficient vehicles. Called the Progressive Automotive X Prize, the competition tasks teams with not only creating the car but also crafting a business plan to produce, market and sell it. The prize is worth $10 million.
Now a freshman at GW, Ms. Davidson continues to compete with her high school team, West Philly Hybrid X, which was the only high school team to enter the competition. West Philly’s 42 remaining competitors -- less than half the original field -- include large auto manufacturers and universities.
Ms. Davidson has her mother, Ann Cohen, to thank for her involvement on the team in the first place. Ms. Cohen, a Philadelphia city employee for 37 years, met the coach of the West Philly team when she helped organize internships for high school students interested in automotive mechanics, and he asked her to manage the team.
“This meant that my mother got to miss dinner once a week, and I had to prepare dinner for everyone else while she was out building cars. Not fair!” says Ms. Davidson, who struck a bargain with her mother: She would continue to make dinner once a week if she got to tag along with her mother to team meetings.
Though she was a junior at a different school, Central High School, Ms. Davidson joined the West Philly team, which registered for the competition last winter. In October it passed a major hurdle -- the design judging in which a team of automotive experts eliminated more than half the teams. It is also worth noting a team that did not make the second round: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“If you learned that MIT and West Philly had entered a $10 million, international contest to produce a car that gets 100 mpg, which school would you expect to make it through the first qualifying round of the competition?” wrote one reporter. “Answer: Not MIT.”
Its success in the first round also earned Ms. Davidson’s team a feature on the Today Show.
The next phase of the competition is the technical qualifiers, which begin in spring 2010.
Ms. Davidson’s multidisciplinary experience with the West Philly team influenced her to seek out a college where she could examine a wide range of subject matter. She knew she did not want to attend a small liberal arts school, and she craved an urban setting where she could learn both in and out of the classroom.
“I don’t know what I want to study -- I like to say that I am decided in my indecision -- but I do know that I want to learn,” she says. “GW is a perfect place to get a great education, because it is situated in Washington, D.C., where the opportunities to explore various occupations, not just government and politics, are endless.”
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