First Blog Post

 Hello! Welcome to my blog

My name is Zachary, and I will be joining OSU for a summer class in the Netherlands on sustainable mobility. I am originally from a small town in Eastern Oregon called Baker City, and have just finished my third year of the civil engineering program at Oregon Tech. I've been greatly enjoying it here, and it's been great fun working with the professors, but I've wanted for some time to get some experience travelling abroad, and there's not much of that available directly through the school. So when I saw that OSU was offering a study abroad program (thank you Dr. Lindgren!), and especially considering it's one I have a personal interest in as well as academic, I practically jumped at the opportunity to apply! 

See, I don't enjoy driving and I never really have for a number of reasons. It's loud, expensive, stressful, and contributes to a lot of environmental issues. Unfortunately, in the places that I've lived there isn't much in the way of alternative options, and it's very much an "either/or" situation: in my hometown, public transit is nonexistent but there is some cycling/walking infrastructure, and in Klamath Falls there's a basic bus system (which has a lot of its own issues, but I digress), but almost no cycling/walking infrastructure outside of downtown, and even then it tends to be fairly basic in its implementation. I want to take this class in the hopes that I can walk away from it with ideas that could help improve the ability for people like myself to choose alternate means of getting where we need to go, when we need to get there.