So this is me. . .

Well, I'm not a blogger. I've never written anything on a blog, no one in my family has a blog, and I think I've only read a blog once or twice in my life, but I thought I'd better get with the times and create a page that everyone can access and read about my daily happenings, so here it goes. . .

So, my name is Ryan Zollinger Davis, I'm 26 years old and I just started graduate school. I live in Logan, UT, a quite town in the middle of Cache Valley. Logan is home to about 45,000 people, 20,000 of which are students going to Utah State University. I am part of those 20,000; I am a graduate student working towards my Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering. I do research on a joint project between the school and Thermo Fisher Scientific. I work under Dr. Heng Ban, who is one of the very best professors in my department. My research entails fluid mixing comparing computational fluid dynamic models to experimental data collected for new technologies being developed at Thermo Fisher (it sounds complicated, but it's really cool; simply put, I get to design and build stuff that mixes fluid).

Along with research and classes I am the volunteer adviser for the Junior Mini Baja team here at USU. The Mini Baja is a competition that SAE holds every year for collegiate students to design and build an off-road vehicle using a 10-hp Briggs and Stratton engine. The Senior Mini Baja team has the opportunity to design and build everything from scratch, which I participated in last year, and the junior team gets the opportunity to take last years model and re-design two or three systems and re-enter it in the race. It's a lot of fun being able to design something and then actually go out into the metal shop and fabricate it myself. The reason I decided to volunteer to be the adviser to the junior team this year is for two reasons. One, I love it; I love being able to go out into the shop and build something that I'm going to race against 100 other teams of university students. Two, I want to pass on my knowledge to those younger than me so that when they are seniors they can do well in the competition. In the past, here at USU, usually all the members of the senior team leave the university after graduation or are too busy to help out at all, so all the things they learned, and all the knowledge they acquired gets lost. I want to start a tradition of graduate students who worked on the team last year helping out and passing on that knowledge to the future teams. These guys one, two, and three years younger than me are representing the name of my alma mater and I want it to be a name respected and revered as a good engineering school.

Well, as far as other things going on in my life. . .I'm still single, but I always have my eyes open for the right girl to come along and help me reach the next chapter in my life. Since starting graduate school I've had a little more time on my hands and so I think I can dedicate more time to dating and getting to know more women. I've never really had a hard time getting a date, but actually dating someone has eluded me often during my college years and I think it's just because I don't spend a lot of time getting to know girls before trying to date them.

Well, I think you've had enough of my life now, so I'll wrap up with one of my life's philosophies: Every stage in life gets harder; when you are in junior high you can't wait to get to high school and when you get there, even though it's better in many ways, it's harder. When you graduate high school the same thing happens with college, and so on. So, as a general trend, life gets harder each day that your alive. From now until the day I die, today is the easiest day I'm going to have; tomorrow just brings more challenges and less time to enjoy the things I have. So I believe that every person should live each day of their life as if it's going to be a great day. Sure, your boss might give you some horrible project, or your girlfriend might dump you, but tomorrow will somehow be harder, so you better just enjoy the time you have now. If you can learn to pick out the good that happens every day in your life, you will never come to an obstacle that you cannot overcome.

I hope you have a wonderful day today.

-Ryan