Going to Texas!

In high school had the incredible opportunity to serve as the National High School President of SkillsUSA, a national career and technical organization that caters to students going into fields where you need a particular skill set to do (think anything from architecture to commercial baking). As a senior I got to travel across the country to talk with business and industry, government officials, and countless students about the value of technical education and my experience as a member of the organization.

Well SkillsUSA is again sending me across the country with an amazing opportunity. I was recently invited to be the keynote speaker at the Texas State SkillsUSA conference Opening Ceremony. This event is the beginning of 3 days of intense competition for students, but also a welcome to the event and a fun ceremony to motivate the students for the days ahead. So here I am, a senior in college, invited to give my first very large-scale (about 3,000 attendees) keynote address!

I am first of all incredibly, incredibly excited and honored. I love speaking and I think I have a pretty good story to share.

With the story of my car wreck, I am going to talk about innovation (my specialty as per the research I am currently doing at UCSD) and how it effects our daily lives with the intention of inspiring them to think innovatively. I’m going to bring up some of the fun inventions of my generation (internet, Facebook, coffee sleeves, the first down yellow line when you watch football) and then bring the speech around to medical innovations and the story of how my life was saved after my car wreck because of the incredible innovations in the field of medicne. I’ll then wrap it up with a talk encouraging students to be innovative-it doesn’t have to be some new groundbreaking idea to be innovative. Maybe it’s a cross of two separate fields (think bio-engineering, the first department of which was begun at UCSD) or a little thing that makes someone life easier.

And now for my request from you. What are some fun or effective innovations that have effected your life? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!!

I fly off at the end of March but will be preparing vigorously over the next few weeks (I really want to be great!) so please let me know your thoughts!

My car caught on fire and leadership!

This weekend I attended the National Collegiate Leadership Conference in Tucson Arizona. If you’re ever passing by Tucson, I’d suggest you stop to take a look at all the interesting 4^th avenue shops and restaurants. A great town to ‘buy local’ in, Tucson is mostly a place where I’ve gone for 2 years now to attend a conference.

The first year, my manager Sam at the Center for Student Involvement asked me and my coworkers if we were interested in attending. Turned out that due to financial matters I was the only one that could attend, so Sam and I took my newly acquired Chevy Lumina the 6.5 hour drive from San Diego into the Tucson sun. We had a great time at the conference and determined that we would have to bring a delegation back the next year.

The year quickly passed and in January I reserved 4 spots for the 2010 conference. It was a surprising struggle to get my peer Leadership Consultants at work to agree to disappear to Arizona in the midst of midterms and the business of life, but eventually 3 girls agreed to definitely attend.

Friday we piled into my car at 8am to make sure we got to the conference in time for the free meal and evening sessions. Now, my car is great but on the drive to Tucson last year it had a tough time on the large hills just east of San Diego. I was a little worried but was a responsible car owner and made sure my oil was changed, my coolant was clean and full and the tires had enough air. We hit the road with smiles and music (and one girl sleeping in the backseat after 5 minutes of driving with an urge to get to Tucson but have fun along the way.

Unplanned, the excitement came to us when driving up the big worrisome hill, my car lost power and started smoking. “Alright” I though, “this kinda happened before the last time I drove this hill”. We pulled over to the side of the road and decided to let the car have a rest (and hopefully) stop smoking. After a few minutes, the smoke wasn’t getting any less dense so I decided to go open the hood to let it air out.

And then the smoke made perfect sense as there was a small FIRE in the engine. I walked as calmly as I could back to the car to ask the girls for water and when they asked why I mentioned the fire situation. They didn’t stay quite as cool as me but we managed to find 1 full water bottle and I poured it on hoping that it wasn’t one of those fires you hear about where water actually makes it worse. Turns out it wasn’t and I masterfully extinguished the fire. Problem was tat my car had been on fire in the first place, so I of course called up Grandpa.

I explained what happened and where the fire was and asked meakly “So do you think I could maybe drive it up to the next exit and find a shop? ….Oh and what about driving it the rest of the way to Tucson?” Well those requests were immediately shut down and after hearing Gram’s diagnostic I begrudgingly called I tow truck. I just got new insurance so I don’t know towing is covered, but I knew I had to do it anyway.

With the tow truck on the way, the girls and I sat and enjoyed each others company and I am so glad that none of them freaked out or got angry at the situation. Well, five minutes later a tow truck showed up with our excited cheering. Except that it wasn’t the company I had called. I asked him how much he would charge ($250 is what he said) and then called the other company that said they were on their way. The guy on the phone flipped out when I told him another truck had pulled up to offer his help (I guess that’s illegal) and he said he’d charge me just $85 if I got diagnostics with him when we got the car to his shop. We took that option and sent Luco’s towing back on their way.

So to finish up the story, one of the girls’ boyfriend drove the hour to Alpine to pick us up and take us back to San Diego where we loaded into another (smaller) car and headed back on our way. By this point we had lost 5 hours of the day and didn’t arrive in Tucson until 10:30pm (1 hour time difference also made an impact). Well, we had planned to stay with some students who offered to host out-of-towners so the cost of the trip was less. 10:30 on a Friday night isn’t exactly the best time to catch a student at home so we arrived and the hosting coordinator didn’t have a place for us to stay and suggested we go have dinner while he tried to make arrangements.

Everything of course worked out fine and we’re now on the road back to San Diego. The conference was again spectacular, with a series of informative and thought-provoking workshops lead by professionals and students. I too presented to a very enthused audience and look forward to sending a list of people the presentation that I gave with some other notes and references for their further information.

I love going to conference like the NCLC for the opportunity to meet and talk with students from across the country and share ideas for each of our personal betterment. Also, the keynote speaker got me really excited for an upcoming opportunity I have in Texas to speak!

The drive home was uneventful but I am somewhat dreading hearing from the auto place tomorrow when they update me on the damage done to my poor car. That thing has given me loads of trouble already and is not something I want to be investing money into, especially as I plan to rid myself of it come graduation when I take off for Europe (another story I’ll have to tell). Cross your fingers for me that it’s not too bad/expensive!

Telluride Ski Weekend!

Over Presidents Day weekend I had an awesome opportunity to go to Telluride, CO for a ski weekend. Telluride, if you don’t know much about it, is a superb ski town in western Colorado. With no main roads or interstates going within 2 hours of the town and a limit to the amount of construction that cane be done due to the geography it is beautifully tucked away town with an epic ski resort. Going to the summit of many mountains the runs gave you a long trip down the mountain before you needed to go back up. At the top you were surrounded by peaks, some of which you could hike to and ski down in nearly untouched snow. Even though they only received maybe 2 inches while we were there, on many of the runs you could find areas of snow that had yet been untouched-something you NEVER see in California and would only see the day of the snow at the I-70 resorts.

Anyway, if you ever have the chance, Telluride CO is truly one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen-and this is largely in comparison to the other Amazing and beautiful sights throughout the rest of the Colorado ski areas. It was a beautiful weekend of skiing and yummy food AND we got to see Andy Bernard from the show The Office (whose name is actually Ed) do a stand-up show! I am a huge fan of The Office, so getting to see him live with his bluegrass band was a big treat!

Winter Classes and singing up for the last Quarter!

I have had priority registration since my freshman year because Campus Tourguides have a special privilege of getting to sign up for classes early to ensure our availability during tour times. The thing is, when I can take any possible class and none of them are full, I have a really hard time narrowing it down to what I want to take and end up always signing up for 1 or 2 classes that I don’t really need or want and then I have to scramble at the beginning of the new quarter to find replacements.

With winter quarter, I ended up disliking 2 of my classes. I was lucky in one point because I had planned to do independent research with a professor, so one of the classes would be covered by that once I got the appropriate approval. Attending a Literature class the first day, I realized there was no way I would want to take the course (it was a Monday/Wednesday/Friday class where all my others were Tuesday/Thursday-4 day weekends, it’s not really a question of what I should do).

So there I was with Politics of European Integration (professor is incredibly dry but the subject is interesting), Intro to Contemporary Dance, and independent research. Looking at Sociology courses of which I needed 2 more to complete my degree, I found a special topics seminar called Sociology of Conservative College Students. Now I am very liberal in my political views so I thought this would be a great opportunity to expand my knowledge and pull some of my beliefs into question and either re-affirm them or make me reconsider. Thus far I’ve done nothing but re-affirm my perspectives, but I do feel much more equipped to understand what viewpoints that some of my peers may have.

My dance class is great-I feel like an antelope many mornings as we leap across the room or roll around on the floor. It’s a lot of fun and while many ask how it is that this can be a college class, I think awareness of ones body and the way movements can and are interpreted are valuable life skills. My research is Incredible. Really absolutely great. I am doing studies of the social dynamics of two innovative industries in San Diego, stem cell research and algae for biofuels. I am doing all of my own research and my advisor believes this is the first study of its kind for each of the industries. My case studies will be added to a report that my advisor was commissioned to do by the American Research Institute in Sydney, Australia that looks at the larger San Diego innovative community to highlight the key factors (social ties, government support, proximity of research institutions) that make innovative companies want to establish themselves in San Diego. We’ve had some interesting findings and I am very honored by the amount of respect and faith my advisor has in me for my research. He looks at me like the specialist and often emails me with questions and information he finds to ask my perspective. It feels pretty great to be asked by my advisor for my opinion.

Next quarter looks like it too will be interesting though again I am not sure that I’ll stay in all the classes that I’m signed up for. Right now they are…

Literature of Chaucer-the English poet. I’m interested but don’t know how I feel about staying in it.

Product Marketing and Management-I’ve heard great referrals for this class and the professor so it should be great!

Urban Sociology, the description being “introduces students to the major approaches in the sociological study of cities and to what a sociological analysis can add to our understanding of urban processes.”

Sociology of Knowledge described as “a general introduction to the development of the sociology of knowledge, and will explore questions concerning social determination of consciousness as well as theoretical ways to articulate a critique of ideology.”

It was really tough to choose my classes this quarter as there were tons of really interesting ones-I definitely found myself looking at the professors to ensure I was choosing ones who have a big reputation to go with the interesting course so that I’ll be hearing from specialists in the field. We’ll see if that way of choosing helps!