2025 Synopsis
Hi everyone!
One of my New Year's Resolutions was to create this mailing list/blog as a way to stay in touch with my friends as we all graduate and move on to the next stages of our lives (shoutout Aarabhi for the idea). If you're reading this, you either filled out my thing on Instagram or I added you myself because I consider you a friend and would like to keep in touch. I'm hoping to send one of these out once every 2-3 months-ish? We'll see. This first post is gonna just be a 2025 wrapped for what I was up to last year!
2025 Highlights
Spring Semester
- Survived long distance with Lizzy
- Visited Florence for spring break and had a lovely time with Lizzy and her family
- Made the world's worst automatic pet feeder (do NOT take ME100 with George Anwar)
- Wrote a python script to predict hydroelectric energy trends in the future with Omar and some other folk
- Led project work for payload on STAR
- Played on the STAR soccer team for an epic one-win season
- Launched some rockets, went on some hikes, saw a couple concerts
Summer
- Had a fun trip to Universal Studios with my parents and brothers
- Took a crazy road trip to Texas for STAR's competition - 6 states, a handful of national parks (including the Grand Canyon), not much sleep, and lots of rocketry!
- Visited London and France for an epic Mormon family reunion
- Drove to Utah with my brothers Nathan and Jeremy to see my sister Emily
- Hosted Lizzy for an epic Tracy trip where her car broke down :(
- Studied abroad in Berlin
- Took 6 weeks of engineering courses in the city
- Learned about 8 words in German (schieße!)
- Traveled to Amsterdam and Prague
- Lots of steps and lots of beer!
- Got stuck in Amsterdam and had to return home through Italy
- Turned 21 and celebrated in Berlin with my dad
Fall Semester
- Enjoyed not being long distance with Lizzy anymore
- Took 4 upper-division engineering courses at once and got all As and Bs
- Moved into a new apartment (finally have my own room!)
- Built a functioning laundry folding machine with Kari and Kevin
- Learned how to use a wind tunnel to run an experiment I designed with Omar and Hamzah (there was another guy in our group but he was a bum so I'm not counting him)
- Kept working on the payload team for STAR amidst design changes, competition swapping, and evolving project definitions
- Had a fun Christmas back home in Tracy
- Took my yearly pilgrimage to Utah to visit Emily
I can’t believe that I only have a semester left as an undergrad. I’m hoping to stick around in Berkletown for another year and get my master’s before getting a (hopefully non-evil) job, but the notion of graduating from college soon is a little insane. Here’s to a fun last semester!
Hope things are going well for you!
Daniel
This post was originally sent out directly to people via email, but I'm sort of combining it with my blog and I wanted to post it here for consistency.
