Meet William Leung, Mechanical Engineering major
A first-year student arrives with all cylinders firing
Leung (third from the left) posing with his racing teammates.
Update 10/28/25:
After a jam-packed few days, the Roosevelt Racers placed in the top half of global competitors and took home the Race Behind the Race Award for their team video and logistics strategy, entitling them to tour DHL’s Asia Pacific Innovation Centre and have a VIP look at the F1 paddock. Additionally, Leung was a finalist for entry to the Komatsu-Williams Engineering Academy, an elite mentoring program.
William Leung had always loved cars, so when he arrived at Eleanor Roosevelt High School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he was especially excited for one activity: STEM Racing, an annual competition that challenges teams from all over the world to design, build, and race model F1 cars, learning engineering concepts, collaboration, and more along the way.
His timing, however, could not have been worse; COVID-19 and assorted administrative problems put a damper on the international event, so William instead threw himself into a variety of other initiatives, including Roosevelt’s Advanced STEM Research program, where he spent the year working on a wave tank that could act as a test bed for preventing seawall damage in varying conditions. Outside of the school year, he also conducted research that involved creating apps for those with visual impairments, working with a professor from the City University of New York (CUNY) system, an ongoing project that cemented his resolve to pursue research opportunities.
Finally, during his senior year, word arrived that the competition was back on, and William excitedly signed on as team engineer. The Roosevely Racers, a name chosen in honor of their school, aced the regionals before heading to North Carolina this past April for the nail-biting national showdown. There was much at stake: only the top three American finishers would be tapped for the international finals.
Luckily, when the proverbial smoke cleared, the Roosevelt Racers had achieved a podium finish and will be headed to Singapore, along with teams from Boston and California, to compete on the world stage. Even more luckily, official rules state that participants need only be under 19, meaning that William remains eligible to compete with his teammates despite graduating this past June.
In that respect, he’ll not only be representing Roosevelt, his alma mater, but NYU Tandon, his new academic home for the next four years. He has already immersed himself in college life with the same enthusiasm he showed during his time in high school. “I’ve joined the Concrete Canoe team already, and I’m naturally hoping to help on NYU Motorsports in the Spring semester as well, since I’ve heard they need Mechanical Engineering majors to focus on the suspension and chassis of the car they’re building,” Leung says. “I’m also really looking forward to the required General Engineering class, which sounds like it will feature a lot of the kinds of hands-on work I did in Roosevelt’s Advanced STEM Research program, so I know I’ll learn a lot.”
