A Short Bio

To begin, I am 21 years old, and I will be 22 by the time we leave to Amsterdam. Originally I'm from Spokane, WA, which is on east side of the state if you're not from around here. I spent 10 years living in California and Illinois, so I've had a chance to experience a little variety. At the same time, I have never been outside of North America, so as you can imagine, I am extremely excited to live abroad this summer!

My Interests:

Now that you have read the "where I'm from" part of the bio, let's move on to some of my potential research interests. First of all, I am a computer engineering major, and technology has been a large part of my life for a long time. I am really excited about finding ways to incorporate technology into my research this summer. In particular, I would really like to explore the video podcast idea and some of the possibilities surrounding it.

Even though I don't know a lot about it yet, I feel like there are a lot of interesting questions that come out of Amsterdam's extremely liberal policies. I have thought about possibly focusing on how their political philosophies affect culture, or how drug use affects business locally versus internationally. For example, are companies in other countries that don't have such a liberal drug policy willing to conduct business with companies in Amsterdam? As a result is Holland a more self-sufficient country that focuses on internal commerce?

These are some of the ideas that I have been thinking about over spring break, but I think I will have a better feel for what I want explore further, as I learn more details about the research and the resulting deliverables. Until I lock in my research topic, I hope this gives you a rough idea of the direction I am thinking about going. If you're thinking about working with me, I'm a pretty easy-going guy, and I am planning on making whatever we do as sweet as possible :)

Just in case you forgot what I look like, here's a picture of me that I happened to have on my laptop from last spring:




-Tim

Update: After reading some other people's bios, I would also like to mention that music is a large part of my life. I am into lots of different types of music, and I'm always interested in hearing new stuff from all genres. I really enjoy good sound, whether it's from a high-end stereo, or a live performance. While I don't know much about music in Amsterdam, I would definitely be interested in focusing my research in some way on music.

Finally, I also love snowboarding, and I'm interested into looking into doing some glacier riding in Switzerland after the conference. I've been holding out to buy my plane ticket until I see if anyone wants to hang out in Switzerland for a while after we're done. So if anyone thinks that might be fun, let me know and we can try and get something planned.