What you don't know...

So a lot has happened lately. I graduated from Walla Walla University, which is great, minus having to say goodbye to the friends I have made. It was nice of my parents, grandparents, uncle, aunt, cousins, and friends to come up and cheer me on! It was a typical graduation, not remembering much except for getting an empty diploma (the rest gets mailed after final grades are determined). 

Graduation was last Sunday and within hours I had to be whisked away to show up in San Francisco for my summer internship paperwork and fingerprinting. Though the internship is close to home, it is through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Hetch Hetchy Water and Power is the specific place I am doing my internship at, where the water from various reservoirs in the Sierra Nevadas are transported via pipe and tunnel to San Francisco for their drinking water, gleaning some hydropower along the way. Anyway, I had to catch a flight down to SF then take BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to where the city buildings were. There I was supposed to have a hotel waiting for me, but when I got there the place was all shut down, no buzzer or anything. So I finally find a place, turns out to be the most sketchy hotel I have ever been in (Europe included). I sleep in my clothes not sure what is in/on the bed. The next morning I get everything all squared away and then head home. 

The internship has been good, having been there only a week. My supervisor left for a week-long vacation after I only being there for a couple days. I have already been assigned a few projects including as-built drawings for some different structures and a design project for a cantilevered platform for one of the gate towers in a nearby reservoir. I am sure I will learn a lot over this summer, I am hoping to get some good pictures of the stuff I will be working on. I’ll keep you posted. 

After my 3-month stint at Hetch Hetchy I will be going up to UC Davis for my masters degree program in structural engineering. Lots of new experiences are being thrown my way, but it is kind of exciting…

For all of you who have no idea what I’m studying to become or what structural engineering is, I have found a great description…

Structural engineering is concerned with the structural design and structural analysis of buildings, bridges, towers, flyovers, tunnels, off shore structures like oil and gas fields in the sea, and other structures. This involves identifying the loads which act upon a structure and the forces and stresses which arise within that structure due to those loads, and then designing the structure to successfully support and resist those loads. The loads can be self weight of the structures, other dead load, live loads, moving (wheel) load, wind load, earthquake load, load from temperature change etc.

The structural engineer must design structures to be safe for their users and to successfully fulfill the function they are designed for (to be serviceable). Due to the nature of some loading conditions, sub-disciplines within structural engineering have emerged, including wind engineering and earthquake engineering.

Design considerations will include strength, stiffness, and stability of the structure when subjected to loads which may be static, such as furniture or self-weight, or dynamic, such as wind, seismic, crowd or vehicle loads, or transitory, such as temporary construction loads or impact. Other considerations include cost, constructability, safety, aesthetics and sustainability.

Source

Now you know…

It has been so long… I realize that I am not much of a blogger. I thought that I should write an update since nothing has been said of this school year yet and what’s going on now…

I will be graduating this June with my Bachelors in Engineering, opening up a new chapter in my life. This school year has shot by so quickly. I have had some pretty tough classes but have managed to do fairly well, even with my procrastination spells! God is good. Lately I have motivated myself to once again run. About a month ago I began to run again, and it has been good. I told myself that I didn’t want to make too much of a fool of myself and do poorly in the upcoming races I had entered, so I began to run. I am no crazy fast runner, but I hope that I will continue to improve! 

Big news for me recently was landing a nice internship close to home for this summer as well as being accepted to UC Davis’s Master’s in Civil Engineering program. I am pretty excited to see things fall into place. The internship will be a good learning opportunity for me I think, working with other civil engineers. I have really enjoyed my structural engineering classes this year, and hope to also enjoy the specialty in structural engineering in the master’s program. 

That’s the big news, I’m afraid the rest of my life may not be all that interesting to all of you, so I’ll spare you the details!

Well summer finally arrived. These last couple of months have been spent in the Tri-Cities area in Washington State where I have been working on an internship. I have been, along with a friend and classmate of mine, designing a concept amphitheater for the Washington State University Tri-Cities campus. They had wanted us to design an amphitheater that could ultimately seat 10,000 guest, though we have found that this would not be practical in the long run, mostly because of parking constraints. At first they did not have much ready for us, and so we spent our time checking out other amphitheaters, creating occupancy calculators, gathering up resources, and learning how to play pool. We finally made contact with some people in the area to steer us in the right direction in certain things and we finally could start the actual design. If you are interested to see what we did, I will be posting up our written report, concept drawings and anything else that relates to our internship project this summer at http://deaconstruction.com/amp. We worked on our written report for about 25 hours out of 48 here two days ago. We will be doing our presentation on Tuesday to the University Chancellor, her cabinet, and others. Hopefully that will go without a hitch! On top of the internship, I have been taking a class online, New Testament Letters, to lessen my load this upcoming school year. I would have had to take 19 credits one quarter if I didn’t take this class, as I hope to graduate this next spring. I’ll be finishing my class about the time of our presentation…

I will drive down to California for some rest from the busyness as of late, hopefully! I am wanting to learn a bit more about web programing to make more feature-rich websites and make them more interactive. In addition, I will need to earn some money. Then back to Walla Walla University to finish up my Civil Engineering degree! There you have it, my summer in a nutshell…

It has been much too long since I have posted on here! Well, to clue you in, I’ve been keeping real busy studying Engineering at Walla Walla University, developing friendships, doing web design, and all the boring stuff you don’t really want to know about anyway… I hope to post again soon, but don’t hold your breath…

Kind of on a whim I decided to go and do the Mountain Man Triathlon here at Walla Walla. This was one of the shorter one, no Iron Man or anything… 500 yd swim, 12 km bike race, and then a 5 km run. Not really sure why I wanted to do a triathlon, I’ve always loathed the idea of doing one before. But I did it.

I knew my chances of success were high. My reasons being: (1) I’ve never swam a lap in a pool in my life (back in the day my sister passed me up in swimming lessons…); (2) Who really needs a nice mountain bike with 24 inch tires or shocks or anything when you have a fully capable 30 lb BMX? (3) and lastly I had only run once in maybe a month… So pretty much I was in top-notch shape!

The day was pretty wet, a bunch of rain. Maybe not ideal weather to do a triathlon. I thought about not doing it, but then I was thinking that it would just be more of an adventure. After I thought that, I was in.

10 minutes after my last class on Friday I showed up at the gymnasium on campus where the pool was at. Originally everything was going to be at Bennington Lake, but it had been mostly drained because of the dam structure there or something. Anyway it was going to be 10 laps at the pool, I had thrown a bunch of stuff into my car before class knowing I wouldn’t have time after class. I crammed my BMX bike, running shoes, and my board shorts in the trunk and was ready. After signing my life away on the waiver, I see guys strutting in in their speedos and stuff. People say speedos and stuff help with the drag in the water, I figured that my board shorts would work for me. There were too many of us to all swim at once, so we had to go in heats. They had everyone that swam 500 yards in over eight minutes swim first. I was hesitant to go with that group, but since there was an extra space right there next to me I hopped in.

They said ready, set, go and I was off. I do my front stroke swim thing to the other wall, and as I turn around (I don’t believe in those flip things, way too much effort…) I see some people behind me and I know instantly I have it made. Before I knew it, it was over! No, just kidding. I was only able to do a front stroke for the first half of the first lap, then I had to switch to the one I knew best: the Pencil, Chicken, Airplane deal. That’s what I remembered from when I was way little, so I went with it. In less than half way through for me, the first person was finished. I didn’t take it too hard, I didn’t even know! I was having a hard enough time staying afloat. When everyone else had gotten out all eyes were on me. The camera man with the waterproof camera had no one else to take shots of, so he followed suit. Finally I finished the 500 yards in 13:30, and way more people than I knew cheered. I’m pretty sure it was because I was the one favored to win, not because they were impatient for the next heat… It turns out that the first guy got a 6:27, okay so I had a bad swim, everyone does now and then!

We then drove to the lake, my poor legs were so sore, I thought they might cramp up if I was to drive. So I let my sister Alison drive. We all unloaded our bikes and everything and sat there next to the starting line ready to go. They told us that we’d start the clock at 6:27 since that’s when the first swimmer came in, and that we’d have to wait until our swim time came up on the clock before we could start. I was thinking, whew… more time to stretch before my 13:30 comes up. There were some nice bikes there, some probably cost at least a couple thousand. But what do I know? I’m no bike expert, all I noticed was that my bike only had one brake, the wheels were 4 inches shorter than theirs, it had no suspension, and no gears.

Finally my time came up and then I headed off on that muddy trail. It was real hard to stay vertical I found. When it is muddy, your bike brakes don’t work quite as good, and I only had one. So it was a chore. My shoes soon became muddy and it was hard to keep them on the pedals. I gave it all I had, it was hard. I only had to walk up a few hills. Under normal circumstances I could have made it up, but with the mud and no gears, it was impossible. I had to hoist that big hunk of metal up on my shoulder and get moving, I had people to catch up to. I took a couple of wrong turns, I’ll blame it on the rain making the signs fall down. Several times I had to get off and scoop all the mud that was making my tire not turn any more, it would just clog up between the brake pads and all up around the tire. All part of the fun. Finally I catch up to two people and pass them, it was great. Someone later had to deflate my excitement by telling me they had chain trouble. Didn’t matter, I passed two people. For the last 3/4 mile or so there was pavement, that was great. I tried to stop at the end and almost plastered a couple of people, those muddy brakes…

Then I was off on the run. It was also hard to run, especially uphill, in the mud. Super slippery. I managed to keep up my 9:30 min/mile pace pretty much the whole time. Then I passed one more person. He was walking in jeans. And then all of the sudden I was done! There were some bananas they were giving out, I ate tons.

You can check out the race results here: http://mitchd.com/files/Mountain_Man_2009.pdf  I’m still waiting for that trophy… when it comes I’ll post a picture of it. In the mean time check out the pictures of the race my sister took here, she took some good ones: http://photos.mitchd.com/ If you’ve read all of this, I commend you.

It has been a busy, but fun last few days, I’d love to tell you all about it, but it might have to wait until Tuesday…

It will be good I promise. I had the hair-brained idea to enter this triathlon, it was crazy. Today I did a 5K race, not so crazy. I will have lots of pictures of my triathlon I will be posting soon, along with the results from the race, so stay tuned!

I was checking out the bulletin when I went to church today, and in it something grabbed my attention. I saw that the Walla Walla Adventist Forum was going to be in session in the afternoon. That sounded pretty appealing to me. The topic was The End of American Adventism? I showed up on time, and grabbed the last available seat; the place was packed. From the title, I was not sure what really would be going down.

In the end I was very glad I attended. The average age at this meeting of two-hundred or so was about 65-70. This turned out to be the very issue that was being addressed. Out of all the people there, only three of us were university students. I was very glad in the end that I had decided to attend. The topic of the whole forum was that of the declining population of the Adventist Church here in America. It turns out that not only are the Adventist Church’s memberships in decline, but also the median age of its members is growing. This is not only a problem with the Adventist Church, the American churches in general are having a similar trend, though worse. First the pastor of the Walla Walla University Church, Pastor Bryan (formerly a Southern Adventist University Church pastor), presented a foundation for the forum to follow. The problems were presented in very clear manner, and then he moderated the conversations to follow.

It was interesting to see the solutions and ideas the group of people had on this issue, especially from my point of view being one of the younger generation. Out of all the ideas given, really only one I thought really addressed the problem of a strong, multi-generational, healthy church. This idea really was one of discipleship and social interaction. I was thinking that out of such a large group of older people on average in the audience how much knowledge was being wasted. I would love to learn about life and religion from many of the Old Timers; their perspective and experience in life is such valuable information!

This is a big deal in the church today—the declining population of youth in the churches. One of the two other university students spoke up saying that we are tired of having car show-type services where cookies and loud music are given so that we will keep coming back. I would have to agree with her. There are many who seem to think that the way to keep us youth in the church is to keep us in with material stuff, when all we (at least me) need is for social interaction among the generations. There is much we could learn and benefit with each other I think.

It is not just the older people at fault in this whole situation. We as youth don’t try and reach out to the older generations either it seems. Here we are addicted to entertainment, and can’t pull ourselves away to have a real and meaningful relationship with God. We have much we could learn from those who are older in the church. I hope I can get my act together and start some of this mingling myself.

Anyway, this whole thing has gotten me thinking. I don’t know if what I’ve just said is logical and cohesive, though I think I got the message across. I’m glad to see there is dialog about this issue happening and I hope to see this intermingling start to happen amongst our multi-generation church. I will leave it at that…