back in college one of my computer science professors put together a group of students for a state cubesat competition, where schools design and build a tiny cube-shaped sataellite. i agreed to join but quickly realized it wasn't going to work. first off the entire team was pulled from CS students - none of us had any sort of aerospace engineering education. second, the prof told us we had a budget of $500, when the competition's website recommended a budget of $40,000. they even sold kits for building cubesats, but of course those were miles out of our price range.
we all still went through the motions by buying some off-the-shelf stuff like sensors and a tiny computer, basically a proto-raspberry-pi, that exceeded our size and power draw limits out of the box. through what was most likely pity from the competition organizers we managed to get to the semi-finals, though I don't know how many schools were participating.
we didn't get anything for our trouble, but every few years i still get an email from the organization that funded the event, asking how my life is going because they want to track participants' progress. i always wonder if they knew how worthless that was for my group.