An enjoyable walk down memory lane preceded my visit to the Thrill Club meeting on 2025 February 5, visiting campus from my sabbatical away. I presented about the history and past activities of the club since its precursor (student research assistants in the THRILL Lab) and establishment as a formal club, and had a chance to think about the great careers that have emerged from the club.
The original research assistant was my daughter, who bravely rode rides and posed so I could take photos. Research assistants, mostly drawn from engineering and health and safety programs, measured rides to make digital models, designed technical control prototypes, made physical scale models, toured the CNE during construction week to learn from inspectors.
Club members built on their CNE experiences to generate capstone design topics that were award winning and career building. The Thrill club was formed, originally named Ryerson Entertainment Design (RED), to secure their own funding to enable them to attend important industry events such as ASTM Committee F24. The photo including some RED members with other universities’ students (bottom left, above) includes several who work for major theme parks and manufacturer/suppliers, often crossing paths and collaborating to this day.
The club continued attending IAAPA, touring theme parks, presenting models at industry events, long days on the CNE construction site, and helping me with industry workshop facilitation.
After co-hosting the first Thrill Competition on campus in 2014, the club attended the 2016 Thrill Competition held at Universal Creative in their offices in Orlando, staying at Cabana Bay Beach Resort. Student participation expanded to students in the Master of Digital Media program, who also attended Orlando field trips to visit parks, meet executives, and tour industry suppliers to learn about entrepreneurship and business relationships in the design of parks. We explored a motion simulator at IAAPA, and TMU acquired one for research on campus.
More MDM field trips, more campus exhibits, more student research/capstone presentations, more competition participation, more IAAPA, graduates making great careers for themselves, and visiting other academic institutions also preparing the next generation of theme park professionals.
More MDM field trips, more club attendance at ASTM F24, my daughter in the club executive serving as an IAAPA Expo Ambassador. The club hosted a design workshop on campus presented by the President and Chief Experience Officer of Cavu. More ASTM student workshops, more design competitions, more IAAPA, campus guest speakers with career advice, more industry exhibits of student models and career-boosting networking.
I ended the presentation (in the Occupational and Public Health computer lab) with a Walt Disney “Walt quote” photographed on a construction wall in the parks: “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”
