BOISE, ID — An unusual pair of entrepreneurs in Garden City will be taking their vegetable oil-powered pickup to the Bonneville Salt Flats in August to see if they can repeat their 2011 feat of breaking a record for speed.

Six years ago, Dave Schenker, Patrick Johnston and their Boise State University student club, Greenspeed, engineered a 1998 Chevy S10 truck to break the world record by traveling 155 miles per hour on vegetable oil at an event run by the Southern California Timing Association.

The Greenspeed club has since become Greenspeed Research, a nonprofit run by Schenker and Johnston, who studied together in Boise State’s mechanical engineering program. The two recently expanded their engine shop in Garden City to accommodate their consulting business, GSE LLC;  an internship program that now hosts three students; the solar go-kart program that Johnston oversees as part of the nonprofit; research on the Chevy that they race at Bonneville Salt Flats in August; and work on another truck that they aspire to race at the annual Baja 1000 in Mexico.

With this complicated array of projects before him, Schenker is focused right now on the Bonneville test in August. As driver, he’s come within six miles per hour of the 215-miles-per-hour record, and hope to beat it at this year’s time trials, which will be held Aug. 12-18 on the dried lakebed on the Nevada-Utah border.

Schenker’s not doing all this to promote vehicle racing, or even to promote the use of raw vegetable oil as a fuel. Instead, his complicated quest is fueled by a desire to promote the refined version of vegetable oil, called biodiesel, and to provide educational alternatives for people who, like him, don’t find the classroom to be the ideal arrangement for learning.

Schenker himself worked in construction for 15 years before entering the mechanical engineering program at Boise State. The Greenspeed club was a way for Schenker to apply his education to real-life engineering projects. That’s the only way he can learn, Schenker said.

“Had I not started Greenspeed, I would not have graduated from Boise State, because I learn by doing,” he said. “I struggle incredibly hard to sit in a classroom and absorb information.”

Someday, he’d like the Greenspeed garage to be a place where local students in physics and other fields can visit to see engineering in action. He’d like to provide a place for others who are interested in engineering, whether they know it or not – and who didn’t find the traditional education system to be a place where they could learn what they needed.

“I don’t know how to name those folks, how to label them, but that is our target market,” Schenker said.

The record Schenker is aiming for in August is the record for a diesel-powered truck. By breaking it with a vegetable-oil-powered truck, Schenker said, he’ll be showing the world that biodiesel is a legitimate source of energy for vehicles.

Only biodiesel and vegetable oil are allowed as fuels in the race; biodiesel, which is the refined form of vegetable oil, is not.

“What we’re strictly trying to prove is that this particular energy source, plant-based in its rawest form, can beat petroleum at its own game,” Schenker said.

If he beats the speed record in August, Schenker said, he’ll be ending a quest that started in 2011 when he broke the petroleum record with vegetable oil. He’ll retire his vegetable oil projects, and work only with  biodiesel.

He’ll also turn his attention to finding a financial partner to finish the biodiesel-powered truck he’d like to run in the Baja 1000, a brutal 1,000-mile off-road race in the desert of the Baja California peninsula. There is no prize money; the only prize is glory.

“If we can be the first biodiesel-powered trophy truck to finish the Baja 1000, that will have a large international impact,” he said.

Meanwhile, he recently received a patent through Boise State University for a method to optimize how two turbochargers work together, and GSE will try to commercialize that patent. He is raising money for the solar go-kart challenge, which fielded eight teams of students in May at Boise State University.

He sees his shop as a community learning center, and his trucks as technology demonstrators, not racing vehicles.

“As a nontraditional student who worked in a skilled trade before going to engineering school, I found myself surrounded by children who knew how to take the triple integral of e to the x squared in their sleep, but didn’t know how to hold a tape measure,” he said. “I feel I have something to offer those students.”

(This story originally ran in 91��Ƶ’s Idaho Business Review, a sister publication of the Daily Journal of Commerce.)

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BOISE, Idaho – Applications to Idaho’s only law school rose 18 percent in 2010, a far greater increase than the national average.

Students submitted 859 completed applications to the University of Idaho’s College of Law, Dean Don Burnett said, compared to last year’s 726.

Law school applications rose about 7 percent at U.S. law schools in 2010, a not unexpected result of the soft economy that had many college graduates deciding to wait out a poor job market by acquiring some more skills. The number of people taking the Law School Admission Test, or LSAT, rose overall in 2009 over 2008, according to the Law School Admission Council.

With new law schools being accredited each year – including the Portland, Ore.-based Concordia University, which is seeking permission to start operating in Boise in 2011 – the number of law students appears to be rising. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks many occupations, competition for law jobs is keen and expected to remain so.

But Idaho doesn’t have a lawyer surplus and isn’t likely to anytime soon, Burnett said, noting that Idaho has been ranked 47th in number of lawyers per capita. The University of Idaho’s law school has been serving nearly the same number of people since the early 1970s, while the state’s population has doubled in that time.

“Idaho has been for a long time, and is currently, a net importer of legal expertise and importer of lawyers,” Burnett said.

About one-third of law school graduates don’t even stay in law, Burnett noted.

Instead, like Ron Freeman, a former tax lawyer who guides students through AP government and debate at Borah High School, they find a profession they like better.

Freeman practiced law for more than a dozen years before he realized, after coaching his son’s Little League team that he would rather be working with students.

“When kids are excited about something, they’re fun to be around,” Freeman said. “There was nothing in my existence as a lawyer that was that fulfilling. This job is much more rewarding.”

Cort Conley, literature program director at the Idaho Commission on the Arts, became a river guide straight out of UC Berkeley Law School and has never practiced law.

That experience is likely to become more common, according to the BLS.

“Perhaps as a result of competition for attorney positions, lawyers are increasingly finding work in less traditional areas for which legal training is an asset, but not normally a requirement – for example, administrative, managerial, and business positions in banks, insurance firms, real estate companies, government agencies, and other organizations,” the BLS report states. “Employment opportunities are expected to continue to arise in these organizations at a growing rate.”

Burnett gave two possible reasons, apart from the economy, for the increase in applications at University of Idaho’s law school.

The university is aiming to offer the third year of law school in Boise as well as Moscow, starting fall 2010. University officials asked the state Board of Education to expand to a full three-year program in Boise, in a hope it would increase the number of students the law school could serve statewide from 300 to 500.

Burnett also said the University of Idaho law school was ranked in the top 10 by the legal magazine National Jurist as one of the best values in law education based on factors like tuition, bar passage rates for graduates, and job placement. In-state law tuition at the University of Idaho was $11,776 in the 2009-10 year. The average in-state tuition for all public law schools last year was $16,836, according to the American Bar Association.

Job placement for new lawyers from the University of Idaho has been higher than the national average. A survey last summer of the previous graduating class found that 80 percent who were looking for jobs secured one. That number is 90 percent or 92 percent in a strong economy, said Burnett.

The BLS report stated a business environment like Idaho’s is a good place to start out as a lawyer.

“For lawyers who wish to work independently, establishing a new practice will probably be easiest in small towns and expanding suburban areas. In such communities, competition from larger, established law firms is likely to be less than in big cities, and new lawyers may find it easier to establish a reputation among potential clients.”

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