Okay, so I'm originally from Fruit Heights, Utah. It's just thirty minutes north of Salt Lake City. The only other place I've lived, I've lived in Mexico. I just lived outside of Mexico City for a few years. So, that was two years ago, and now I've just been at the University of Utah ever since then. Things I enjoy doing are mostly things in the summer which are things oriented around the lake. I really, really enjoyed going to the lake and doing things like wakeboarding, fishing and other things like that. I really enjoy mountain biking, motorcross. I'm doing a lot of outdoor things that typical people in Utah enjoy doing. I do have a softer side. I do like to get into a good book every once in a while whenever I don't have a huge home work load which isn't often but whenever the opportunity does present itself, I like to find a good book.

So, a lot of the courses we take are a mixture between geology courses and civil engineering courses. A lot of those courses have been pretty instrumental in how I've like my degree because it's been a good mixture of the two and then other activities I've been involved in. I've been involved in a student group by the name of the Society for Mining Metallurgy and Exploration. That group has a lot of opportunities for leadership, and I'm currently the representative for freshman and sophomore transfer students. So, I'm helping people kind of get into the swing of things through the mining engineering department and that's how I've been able to be involved in the mining program. Also, as an ambassador for the college of mines and earth sciences has helped me. It's kind of being double because I'm in the mining engineering department but I'm also with the college, and it's almost one of the same because we do take so many classes from the other departments within the college. So for me, it's all about interacting with a bunch of different courses. So, that's been some of the ways that I've been involved and those are some of the courses that I've taken. I've taken now that I'm a junior getting into more of the mining classes and getting into more heavy mining classes. So it's more oriented around the mining engineering stuff, but these past two years have been great because I've been able to interact with a variety of students from other degrees and departments.

So, in high school I was involved with a class that was kind of like an internship in high school, well like a job shadowing almost and I went and I would do that every other day for like two hours, my work for a civil engineering firm, and I was kinda new. I wanted to do engineering but I didn't really know where and I've always like construction so doing that civil engineering internship slash job shadow was really eye opening for me because to me it was really, really boring. The engineers seem like they're on the computer all day in an office never really left to go on the job, and it was a lot of design work and just stuff with computers that really didn't interest me. And so I didn't know what to do, but in order for that class to receive credit I had to do a report and in that report I found some salaries for engineers, and I saw one of the top paid engineers was mining engineer and I was like, "what in the world is mining engineer?" So I started researching it, found out that the University of Utah has one of the top programs in the nation and that really motivated me to study mining engineering. And it's been great because as mining engineers, your job can be as technical as you like or as hands on as you like and so for me that's been one of the main reasons why I have picked mining engineering. It was just because of the flexibility and what you can do and where your future is. It's not stuck in an office somewhere sitting on a computer.