Well, I could be wrong, but I believe diversity is an old, old wooden ship

Last Thursday I went to see Ron Paul in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union. I figured this would be a good event for me to go to because I really needed to attend one and he will probably receive my vote when election time comes around.

Ron Paul is a physician, congressman, and presidential candidate from Texas. He advocates for a dramatic reduction in the size of the government and a return to our constitutional principles. He is currently second in most major polls for the Republican nomination. I believe that he is bringing the right mindset to the table.

Being that he really wants to reduce the size of the government, he wants to slash the Federal Reserve and Departments of Education, Homeland Security, Health and Human services, among others. I don't agree with the cutting of some of these such as the Department of Education and Homeland Security, but I do not feel these actions would actually pass a vote.  Paul is all for giving the states all rights that aren't explicitly given to the national government, but I'm really not sure the state governments are ready for this undertaking.

While I applaud Paul for his mindset and thinking that our country needs a major overhaul, I don't think we need to go quite as far as he wants. Nor do I think any Congress would allow this, no matter who has the political majority.  I feel that he has the potential to really turn things around, even if some of his ideas are somewhat drastic.

How I've grown and what I've learned

When I got to college, all of the experience I had was from high school.  While in high school, I didn't really have any responsibilities, I had somebody there to help guide me the whole way.  Here, the Hixson program somewhat stepped into that role, but not near as much as what I had before. I wasn't used to doing a lot of homework or studying, but I quickly learned that I needed to change that right away.  I didn't really have any good studying habits because I just didn't have to do it.  The classes in high school were easy enough that if I did the homework I could easily get an A in the class.  Here it is completely different, from the classroom environment to the way I study and do my homework.

Since arriving at college, I have had way more homework and studying to do compared to high school.  I have learned how to study better and how to get homework done, regrettably I didn't put enough time into this class and I am now going back and doing these blogs I blew off before.  That has helped me grow as a student.  I have also had to learn to manage my time better because I have more homework and studying to do.  I feel attending a major university really helped in my maturing process.  Overall,  I have grown as a person and a student because of college, which I feel will only continue.

What the Hixson means to me

The Hixson Award means a lot to many people.  I was almost certain that I was going to attend Iowa State, but receiving the news I had been awarded this scholarship sealed the deal.  I had been getting to the point that I was sure it had been awarded to somebody else. One day I came home from school and began my normal routine of sitting down on the couch and turning Sportscenter on and relaxing when all I could hear was my mother yelling uncontrollably from the kitchen as she was opening the mail.  Coming from a family where it is a question of whether or not there will be enough money to last the month, it meant a huge deal receiving this scholarship.  I appreciate the fact I was picked because it is nice to know there is someone who cares enough to help me further my education.  It might not seem like I really cared as I slacked when it came to doing these blogs, but this scholarship has been a huge influence on my and the way I look at things now.  I made sure to give it my all in every single one of my classes, just to try and fulfill my part of our groups GPA goal.  It is probably one of the best awards and scholarships I will ever receive, I is a huge honor to have been selected and I have met some of the coolest people since I moved to Ames.  The only thing left to say is thank you Christina Hixson and everyone else for giving me the chance to further my education.

Social Media Week

For this blog's topic, we were to do a week of social media postings. We had the options to choose Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, do a youtube video, or create a website portfolio. I wasn't necessarily excited about this project because I didn't see much benefit to it.  This view defiantly changed after completing this assignment.

For social media week i choose to use Facebook.  I choose Facebook because I already had an account and I need to finish it quickly.  I found ten companies and articles related to my field of study, which is Mechanical Engineering.  I choose companies from NASA to John Deere.  There are a lot of companies that need Mechanical Engineers and there are a lot of different rolls an engineer could play while working for a company.  I learned that Facebook and other social media sites can be helpful in finding a job that you would like.  They allow you to view a company without having to visit them on site.

These types of social media can be bad in some ways.  If there are pictures of you not doing the right thing or if you had an inappropriate status at some point, companies could see these pictures or statuses and decide to choose another candidate over you simply because they would not want you representing their company.  I learned that you need to know how to use a lot of different types of social medias and know what is out there about yourself.  After the start of this I went through and cleaned up my accounts, going back over a year and seeing some of the mistakes I had made since the creation of my accounts.

MBTI Results

I feed that my MBTI results were dead on.  My results came back as me being ESTP. According to Myers-Briggs, ESTPs are hands-on learners who live in the moment, seeking the best in life, wanting to share it with their friends. The ESTP is open to situations, able to improvise to bring about desired results. They are active people who want to solve their problems rather than simply discuss them.

I did some looking into my type and found some interesting results.  People with the ESTP type are known as promoters, in social situations, they are directive and expressive. Promoters are also resourceful, knowing where the fun and the action are. They like to indulge themselves in the finer things in life and to bring other people with them. Their goal in life is to sell themselves and their ideas to others.  Another interesting thing that I found while looking into this was a list of famous people that I share a type with.

The ones that stuck out to me include:
Winston Churchill
John F. Kenedy
General George Patton
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
and Donald Trump

I have a bucket?

 I could go on for days on all of the things I want to do before I die, but I don't feel like typing that much, so I'll stick to about  10.  At the top of my list is to go to Australia.  I have always been fascinated by the landscape and diversity in the animals that live there.  On the topic of travel, I also would love to see more of Europe.  I say more because I spent several weeks in Spain the beginning of this last summer.


Now for the outdoors.  Back home, the outdoors would be my place to escape.  I would spend many hours fishing, hunting, and hiking to get away from everything.  I do not read much, but Hatchet is by far my favorite book of all time.  If you have read one of the the squeals to the book, you would know that he returns to the area he was forced to survive. I would love to do something like this, just pack up a canoe with the essentials and head off for a couple weeks or months.  Another one of my wishes is common with many others, and that would be to go skydiving.  I had everything planed out earlier in the year to go, but got busy with college prep and other things and never got around to it.  I would love to get my license eventually, which would work out well with one of my friends that wants to get his pilot's license.

Some more of the trivial things that I would like to do would be: go bear hunting in Alaska, spend one season as a deckhand on a crab boat, attend the super bowl, see the Cubs win the world series (they're overdue for that), complete a marathon and possibly an Iron-man, and drive on the autobahn.

At my best

As I write this, it is the exact situation in which I work my best, under pressure.  I noticed this over my last semester of high school. When I would put off an assignment and do it at the last minute I would always do well on it, but when I did it well ahead of time I would find myself getting distracted and not working at my best.

Some of you that know this was supposed to be done a week ago, but I put it off, like everything else and was told I have until midnight tonight to finish it.  In saying that it made me notice another thing about me, I procrastinate way too much, which is one thing I hope to have fixed by the end of the year.

So now I really dont know what to talk about even though I have two more paragraphs to do, so I'll tell you a little about myself.  I grew up in Maquoketa, a small town in eastern Iowa.  My parents divorced when I was 12, which kind of shook me for awhile after I was told.  At that age, school came very easy to me so it was not affected much, but it would set up problems later on in life.

In more recent years it became a distraction in school always arguing with my dad, and hearing my mom argue with him.  Trying to make our schedules work with his just didn't happen.  He would get angry when I couldn't make it to see him, which also upset me.  This would lead to my grades slipping in school, and me barely sliding by in my classes.  This procrastination became a bad habit, which I still fight today.

That's all I have to say for now, and with one minute to spare I should post this.

What's going on here?

You are probably wondering where in the world my blog name came from.  This last winter, my friends and I created what I think is the best snowman ever.