Who Am I?

Hello,

My name is Stephen Kistler.  I currently am a Senior at BASIS Scottsdale.  In the upcoming fall, I will be attending Colorado School of Mines, an engineering focused college located in Golden, Colorado (for those unfamiliar with Colorado geography, Golden is just west of Denver).  I was also born outside of Denver, and lived there for the first ten years of my life.  As you would expect, I am pretty excited to return for college.

Golden, Colorado (from Colorado.com)

Now that’s all great, but it still doesn’t tell you much about me.  For that I’ll go over my interests a bit. Academically I am interested in engineering (what a surprise based on the college I choose right?). More specifically, I am choosing between mechanical engineering and petroleum engineering, with the hope of finding a way into the energy sector.  Why the energy sector? Well mostly because I feel that some of the greatest challenges facing our society today lie there, and I would like to attempt to help solve them.  Oh, and there are jobs in that sector.  Shockingly, I also have interests outside of academia.  I love sports, both playing and observing.  I’ve played a ton of sports from soccer to basketball to baseball and try to get up to the mountains to go skiing whenever I can (for the record, skiing is better than boarding, sorry but it’s the truth).  As far as what sports I watch, I am a fan of most sports but especially football and hockey (Go Broncos, and Go Avs).  And yes, I still cheer for the Colorado teams over the Arizona teams.  Sorry Cardinals.  I also enjoy reading.  A Song of Ice and Fire, the Game of Thrones series for the non-book readers, is currently my favorite series.

Ah but you guys are here for my research project.  I am still working on finalizing some details and as such only have so much information to share.  What I can share is that I hope to be working at an energy company in California.  My exact work is still not yet finalized but I hope to be doing work in relation to the refinery process of oil or natural gas.  Overall, I am excited about the prospect of working in the field that I plan on entering as well as gaining experience and insight into it.  I do have to thank Mrs. Bailey (my vector calculus teacher) and her father for this opportunity, as they provided the connections and pointed me towards the company.

Anyways, that’s a bit about me and what I plan to be working on.  I hope to be able to give a fuller picture as to the exact details of my research as it becomes more finalized.

Stephen