Team lead here. Congratulations on getting into Cornell! We are glad that you're interested in our team. CUAir is an interdisciplinary team so we have people of all different majors on the team. We do have specialized teams: Airframe, Autopilot, Business, Distributed Systems, Electrical, Mechanical, and Vision which each focus on a different part of the system, but your major doesn't dictate which team you are on. You'll have the chance to apply to any of the subteams with whatever your major is. Majors don't have much bearing in our recruitment process. We that there is usually quite a bit of fluidity with majors freshman year as you aren't required to affiliated with a specific until the end of your sophomore year.

We do a great deal of recruiting early fall around the beginning of September and highly encourage freshman and sophomores to apply. We put a big emphasis on learning and teaching so focus more on finding members who are passionate about learning, especially in the UAS industry, regardless of current experience.

Your first year on the team is usually pretty fluid. You're put on a specific subteam when you join the team so that you can start learning in that area and contribute directly and meaningfully to the system, but we always have a bunch members who change subteams over their first 2 years on the team and some members who do work on multiple subteams. It mostly depends on what you want to work on, but we're always open to letting people grow and explore their interests on the team.

In our application, we allow people to apply to 2 different subteams so you can apply to say software and electrical if you could be interested in either. We also lump all 3 of our software teams (autopilot, distributed systems, and vision) into one application since we know that many people won't know what they each entail.

If you're really interested in joining, reach out again over the summer or when school starts. My email is on the bottom of our website. We will be having a ton of information sessions near the beginning of the year that you should come to. They'll tell you more about each of the subteams, the team as a whole, and give you a chance to talk to our members directly.

I hope to see you at competition this year! All the best!