MSU wins first SEC Project MFG Championship

Contact: Camille Carskadon

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State University students from the Innovation, Design and Engineering Education Laboratory, or IDEELab, have earned the university’s first Project MFG Southeastern Conference Machining Championship.

After four consecutive years of competing and two back-to-back second-place finishes in 2023 and 2024, the team earned the top spot in the 2025 regional advanced manufacturing competition held this month at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Supported by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment program, Project MFG aims to strengthen the country’s advanced manufacturing workforce pipeline by challenging university and technical college teams to solve industry-level design, machining and fabrication problems under real production conditions.

MSU’s Bagley College of Engineering student competitors, Russell “Taylor” Stigall of Brandon, Collin Mullins of Kilmichael, Caleb Pepper of Ocean Springs and Jacob Sheley of Henderson, Tennessee, all trained through the Michael W. Hall School of Mechanical Engineering’s hands-on undergraduate manufacturing makerspace IDEELab.

These students leveraged their experience gained through hands-on components in their curriculum and spent weeks preparing for the two-day challenge. Before and during the competition, they were required to complete a sequence of computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing and precision machining workflows.

Alejandro Martinez, one of the team’s advisors along with Aidan Duncan, said the competition gave students real-world practice in quickly adapting to change.

“During the competition, students face challenges that require them to think critically and make real-time adjustments to part specifications, deal with tool breakages and maintain precision under time constraints,” Martinez said. “This hands-on experience teaches them to manage variables like temperature and tolerances, which are crucial in manufacturing.”

Organizers design the tasks to mimic what engineers encounter in industry, including the pressure of production schedules, requiring competitors to balance engineering precision with the realities of real-world throughput.

“The competition is a great tool to build technical skills, while enhancing teamwork, problem-solving and understanding of industry standards,” Duncan said. “It’s a significant stepping stone for students preparing for careers in engineering and manufacturing, and this competition really does well at highlighting key concepts for today’s engineers-to-be.”

For the four mechanical engineering students, the event demanded both technical mastery and attention to detail. Each team member took responsibility for preparing and machining different parts, relying heavily on their coursework, lab training and countless hours of independent practice.

Stigall said the competition delivered a clear picture of expectations inside the manufacturing industry.

“The event simulates what you see in the field, like making a high-quality part in a short amount of time with the tools you have,” he said. “It’s easy to take an hour to make a perfect part, but making a perfect part in five minutes is hard. We were constantly experimenting with machining speed and feed rates, especially for something like the gear we machined with all its small pockets. If you push too fast, you risk breaking a tool.”

CNC programmer Mullins said the team spent long hours in the IDEELab refining their strategies and parts ahead of competition day.

“We spent a lot of time dialing in our parts and figuring out how fast we could go while holding tolerance,” he said. “Once we learned we could bring three of the parts with us, everything changed. We shifted from speed to perfection and spent a lot of late nights, sometimes until 2 a.m., working to get everything right.”

Together, the students said the competition strengthened their confidence as they prepare for future careers and showed what dedicated preparation can accomplish.

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