1. You recently went to Monaco for five days. What brought you there?
Well, last summer, my three friends and I worked with an MIT grad student named Shane and this other guy named Ronny to modify a go-kart. Shane drove out to Ohio to pick up a gas go-kart used for professional go-kart racing, or something ridiculous like that. Anyway, it was pretty sweet, but we wanted to make it electric. So, we used a few batteries, a motor, and something called an “ultra capacitor.” Shane wrote a paper on what we did (and some of us helped), and submitted it to this program called “EVER Monaco.” Our paper was accepted, we asked MIT for some funding, and then off we went to Monaco.

2. So, who were the friends who helped you make the go-kart?
Costas Akrivoulis, Max Hill, and Mike Paresky.

3. What kind of work did you guys do on the go-kart?
We set up some electronics for regenerative braking on the kart, and we did it in a different way than they’d done before. We used the ultra capacitor, which stores a lot of energy. It is like a battery, but it can put energy out a lot faster.

4. What exactly is “regenerative braking”?
Well, when you’re moving, you have energy; most brakes, like in cars, convert that energy into heat, but then you’ve just lost energy. In regenerative braking, you recapture that energy so you can use it again to speed up or do whatever you want with it–microwave a burrito, whatever.

5. Who else went on the trip?
It was the four of us, Shane, Ronny, and Mike’s dad.

6. What were you expecting as you arrived in Monaco?
Well, none of us had been to a conference like this before. So, as for the conference, we weren’t sure what to expect. We were the first presentation after one of the big kickoff ones, which was a little scary. In the end, though, it was mostly what we expected: we presented, people asked us questions, and then we watched a bunch of other presentations. Some of them were pretty cool.

7. I don’t think many other students at Wayland High School have been able to experience a place like Monaco. What is the country like?
I thought Monaco would be really beautiful and Mediterranean, and it was, but it was more. Monaco is kind of like a European version of Las Vegas. It’s clean, it’s fake — palm trees on every street corner, it’s flashy and above all, it’s rich. There were Lamborghinis everywhere; if you drove a BMW in Monaco, you were probably poor. It was ridiculous. So, that surprised me.

8. Who was at the conference?
The conference had three types of people: students/professors, industrial researchers, and marketing people. There were professors and some PhD students from places like Italy, Poland, and Turkey. There was a guy marketing fuel cells from Germany, and there were industrial types, but I didn’t see too many of them in the presentations I went to. However, during the second day of the conference, guys from Honda, Nissan, and some other big companies gave some speeches, and then they signed an agreement with the Prince of Monaco saying something or other about renewable energy.

9. How many other high school students were there?
None. We were the only ones!

10. What else did you experience aside from the conference?
While the conference was going on, there was an exposition, which is kind of like a trade show. There were lots of prototype electric cars from companies like Mercedes, Honda, Mitsubishi, and Nissan, along with Segways and European brands of things and whatnot. There were other renewable energy groups at the exposition too, demonstrating products for things like lighting and solar power and stuff like that. I got to test drive a bunch of electric cars and Vespa-type things. It was pretty sweet. I even got to take one of them on the Monaco Grand Prix Race Track for a good twenty minutes. On Saturday, too, there was the finish of a rally–a bunch of hybrid/electric cars had driven across France, down to Monaco, and finished right outside the exposition. There were some awesome cars in it like the Tesla Roadster.

11. So was reusable energy the main theme of the conference?
Yep, it’s in the name: Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies. Our project fit in because it was a go-kart, which had regenerative braking, which is energy-efficient.

12. So, going back to the paper that you all prepared that brought you to Monaco. Did the paper explain how you made your go-kart?
The paper was six pages (single-spaced) with a little bit on how we’d built the go-kart, but it mostly focused on the differences of our regenerative braking technology compared to other technologies in use and why it was better.

13. I heard that you won something for your impressive paper; what was this award?
We won “Best Student Paper on Ecological Vehicles.”

14. Were you expecting such success?
Not at all.

15. How did the conference organizers present the award to you guys?
They presented the award to us at a dinner (which all the presenters from the conference attended, as part of the event) at the Fairmont Monte-Carlo, which was the most ridiculous meal I’d ever eaten. There was gold leaf on the cake.

16. What else did you do while you were in Monaco?
We got crepes and paninis (because it’s France, so you have to do that), went souvenir shopping (yeah, it’s touristy I know), and test-drove cars. Also, one night Costas and I walked around till 2:30 and then got pizza. We were time-shifted the entire time we were there, pretty much.