
EK works on the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle team (Photo Credit: Magali Gruet/USC)
Paul Ronney walks like a man who has too many things he’s excited to show you. He rounds a corner of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and pushes open a door, and suddenly you’re somewhere you were not expecting: a vast, humming space that smells faintly of metal shavings and warm resin, where students in safety glasses bend over machines at all hours, making things.
“This,” says Ronney, chair of the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, with the quiet satisfaction of someone unveiling a painting they love, “is the Baum Family Maker Space.”
A Donor, a Library, and a Vision
The Baum Family Maker Space didn’t always look like this. For years, AME students had nowhere to really build: no dedicated home for the welders, the machinists, the…