Getting Under The Hood: What MBHS Auto Club Has Been Up To

Members of Auto Club, an extracurricular at MBHS that meets weekly during tutorial, have recently embarked on an overnight field trip to Las Vegas, NV, visiting the SEMA car show.

The club visits SEMA annually, an event that is not typically open to the general public. Senior Isaac Boggs shared that the event has “four huge showrooms,” where members of the club get to roam “decently free-range,” and “explore, check out cars, and take lots of pictures.”

Though attending events such as these can be exciting, members of the club shared that opportunities like these are simply a fraction of what is so enticing about the extracurricular.

Senior Gabe Pascual, who has been a member of the Auto Club for four years, said that the best part has to be “working on cars and being able to do stuff on your own vehicles when you need to modify everything,” said Pascual. Likewise, Boggs pointed out that those skills learned often translate into the real world, sharing that the club brings about job opportunities. “You get the skills to go out and have the ability to learn to become a mechanic, learn welding,” said Boggs.

For these reasons, Pascual and Boggs both encouraged any student who has an interest in the field to join the club. “You’ll learn a ton about how to work on vehicles, how to save yourself in bad situations if your car breaks down. You just learn how to work in the real world. It doesn’t matter if you’re going into the auto industry or working in a different trade; it’s a good skill to learn,” said Pascual.

As of this year, there is not necessarily a set meeting time for Auto Club, so it has become a group that currently has to meet during Tuesday’s tutorial. During a typical meeting, the club discusses its budget and what it would like to do in the future, with the most recent thing the club spent money on being the SEMA trip. During the event, according to Pascual, students got to see the “manufacturing side of the business side of the auto world.”

“It was nice to see all these finished products, like we get to see after modifying our cars,” said Boggs, with Pascual adding, “I like the puzzle side of it, like finding the problem, figuring out what the heck’s wrong with it. So, going from diagnosing to figuring out how to fix it.”

In the near future, the club hopes to go to more events and eventually get the opportunity to actually show some of their own creations. If you have any interest at all in joining, the Auto Club is ready to welcome you with open arms and a wrench in hand!