Summer.... doesn’t really mean what it used to mean. Hanging out with friends and sleeping in until 11AM has been replaced by internships and cooking all my own food (and when I say cooking I mean “attempting to cook”). However, this doesn’t mean this summer has been bland, it has been an extremely interesting and fun three months.

For the majority of the summer, I was up in Kenosha, WI interning at Rehrig Pacific Company, a plastics manufacturer (www.rehrigpacific.com). It was my first “real world” engineering job and I was treated as a plant engineer. It was a fantastic internship that gave me experience leading my own projects, making purchasing decisions, and working a lot with my hands. My favorite and largest project was installing a variable frequency drive (VFD) and sensors to two conveyors so that they could go at a slow speed, fast speed, or queue up products with the flip of a switch instead of only being on/off with a single speed. The VFD will help to increase the efficiency of an operator, and could possibly cut temp labor. Overall I was told that I did a great job at the internship, however there was one problem... I pronounced the company name wrong for the whole summer. I pronounced it as “rey-rig”, whereas it is supposed to be “rare-ig”.

Besides the internship, I had some other interesting adventures and fun times. My living situation was a learning experience, and I won’t go into all of the details, but I will say that I found where to live on craigslist... I let your imagination take it from there. In the end I did live with a couple named Brandon and Erika that made living in Kenosha not bad at all! I also did a lot of hanging out with work friends playing volleyball every thursday at a local bar/restaurant and went out drinking and to dinner with them occasionally. On the weekends I would visit my girlfriend Stephanie, and we did a variety of fun things which included going to Six Flags, Starved Rock, and farmers markets. She also baked and cooked for me a lot which I brought back to my home in Kenosha which helped me stay healthy and not starve.

Below are some pictures of various things from this summer:

Paintballing with Steph



Doing the Warrior Dash with Cody
(5k run with obstacles)



Fishing in the Ozarks



Salsa Steph and I made for me to take to work

It is currently the second semester of my junior year, and life is the busiest it has ever been. My classes are all very challenging, I am still the president of Salsapreneurship Club, I am the historian of KDR, and I am working with a team on a website. The website idea is hard to explain, but to describe it in a short statement, it is a “campus-based, social entertainment and informative network for college students” (hopefully that makes sense haha).

I haven’t had time for anything besides those activities lately, but I have had an intense longing to get some stuff done on my college bucket list, which consists of experiences I want to do before I turn 23. Im graduating in Dec. 2012, and I figure real life starts after I graduate; so I need to get stuff done before that all begins. The experiences I still have left to do are go bungee jumping, learn to play the piano, scuba dive, go to a large paintball game, go to a Red Bull Flugtag or Soapbox Race event, brew my own beer, crowd surf at a concert, learn to do a standing backflip, and touch my toes (ya that’s right, I’m not flexible enough to easily touch my toes). A few of these I can do with some concentration and little time, but others will take a mini vacation and a load of cash. Hopefully I can get them all done before the “real world” comes.

I also have a life long bucket list that mainly consists of travel adventures. At the top of the list is going to Easter Island to see the Moai statues. We only live life once, and I encourage everyone to make a bucket list so you can make sure you have the experiences you want to have, see the sites you want to see, and have more fun before it’s too late!


Moai statues on Easter Island