Get creative p1 - Military Transition - Military Times EDGE

Sam Zhao figures he has the coolest job in the world. He might be right.

A former Marine sergeant, Zhao left military motor transport in 1998 to pursue his lifelong dream of vroom. As a child, he stared in wonder at the stainless steel supercars of the New York Auto Show. Back home he raced toy roadsters and transfigured Transformers.

Now he’s a creative designer with General Motors. That 2010 Chevy Equinox tearing up the highway at a massive 32 miles to the gallon? That’s his design. Zhao worked with engineers to help the car earn its whopping 32 mpg. More than this, though, his visual sense gave the vehicle the sculpted, curvaceous lines that set it apart from past GM models.

“It’s the creative side, the sense that you are creating something that is futuristic, something that people might aspire to have,” said Zhao, 33. Born in China, he came to the U.S. at age 6. He served from 1994 to 1998 at Camp Lejeune, with a deployment to Okinawa and a float in the Mediterranean.

College & connections

To make the leap into the world of professional auto design, Zhao hit the books, enrolling in the bachelor’s degree program at Michigan’s College for Creative Studies at a cost of more than $7,000 per semester. He used grants and loans to pay for tuition, and his Montgomery GI Bill entitlement was enough to cover living expenses.

Car lovers who want to make the leap to auto design likely will need a design-school degree with an emphasis on transportation. Design schools typically offer courses of study in transportation design or automotive design, or a transportation concentration within the industrial design course of study. The best programs are highly competitive. A few include the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., Academy of Art University in San Francisco, the Cleveland Institute of Art and Pratt Institute in New York.

The design degree is necessary, but it’s not enough. These jobs go to those who can deliver the goods, as demonstrated through a portfolio of drawings, sketches and sculpture. “You want to constantly sketch, to constantly come up with ideas,” Zhao said. “The car companies are looking for creativity, and the only way to show that is to constantly sketch.”

Zhao was working for American Sunroof Corp., which was supplying design work to General Motors, when he made the contacts that would help him during GM’s application and interview process.

“They had seen my work before, and they liked it,” Zhao said.

The job

How do you design a car? Start with the stuff lying around on your desk.

“Sometimes I can just be looking at something as simple as a stapler and I will come up with a new idea, thinking about how I can make it more ergonomic, how I can make it cleaner so it will match the rest of the office décor,” Zhao said. “To me a stapler is still very basic, very 1960s, with its hard edges. I think about where you can go with that, how you can make it softer, more modern. Those same ideas carry over to designing a vehicle for our customers.”

GM alone employs 70 to 100 creative designers. They work in teams, the teams share ideas, ideas get transformed, and cars emerge from the process.

Sometimes the company will sponsor a contest: Which designer can best define the next-generation Camaro?

“Even if a project gets canceled, the ideas that we generate can be interpreted into the future, for use on other projects. Just because a concept car does not go into production, that does not mean it has no usefulness,” Zhao said.

The future

Zhao said he and his colleagues are moving forward with cautious optimism despite the crisis in the auto industry.

“Obviously, because of General Motors cutting back on production and selling off brands like Pontiac and Saturn, all of that impacts our design, since we are limited to just those brands that remain. But it also helps us in some ways because we can be a little bit more focused in what our product lineup will be.”

As GM’s designers have learned to narrow their focus, they also have undergone what Zhao characterized as some relatively minor layoffs within their ranks. Nonetheless, the general mood is upbeat.

“Obviously, people are always worried about what the future is, both in their job and their personal life, but a lot of us do feel confidence in the company itself. Also, as the product developers — the ones who make new products — a lot of us designers do feel a little bit more confident that we are doing something good for the company, so that our jobs will still be required.”