User:UpikeAustin

A Little About Myself
My name is Austin Tyler Thacker. I’m 19 years old going on 20 this year. I was born and raised in Pikeville Kentucky, and that’s where I plan to stay. I come from a family of coal miners, and railroad workers, so I am the first person in my family to attend college. Although I come from a very small town, I am culturally diverse, I am fluent in Spanish and love travelling outside the United States.

I attend the University of Pikeville (UPIKE), where I am studying Pre-Med with a major in Chemistry. Not only am I involved at the University academically, I also run Track & Field for UPIKE. This is the first year that they have had a Track team. I’m studying to be an Emergency Room physician, so I can help better my community and the lives of those who need help. I love helping people and that’s really the main reason I’ve always wanted to become a doctor. I came to the University of Pikeville because of their amazing Pre-Med program as well as the class size. The most important reason I came to UPIKE is because I got to stay home with my family, and family is very important to me. Although the university may be small, the value on education is very well stressed, and there are ample opportunities for students to further their education. Such as myself, I applied for the 2014 Colonel B. Ledford Fellowship and was accepted and will be conducting research on pancreatic cancer cells alongside a researcher from UPIKE- KYCOM, which is the local medical school. I am very excited for this opportunity to expand my knowledge and for the possibility of going to International Medical conventions. Education is one of my top priorities, but you can’t live life without having fun. I love hanging out with my friends, which I truly consider family. Even though I have a job, run track, and go to school full-time I make time for my family and friends. Most of my friends I have had for years, but I’m slowly gaining more and more thanks to going to college. You meet people you never would have imagined you would, and they become some of your closest friends. Not only am I an athlete, student, employee, I am also what modern day considers a gamer/ technology buff. I’m one of the guys that preorders any game I think looks cool and will stand in line for hours to get a new system. My free time is usually consumed by games, music, and cooking. Although I try to make all this sound glamorous, it is very difficult to find the balance between it all. Sometimes I feel just overwhelmed with the stuff I have to do, but since I have been working since I was 16 years old, while in high school and playing sports, I can seem to make it look like a cakewalk. The stress is very much real and is always there I have finally learned how to control all the stress and make myself a better worker!

My View On Technology
Being born in my generation, technology is constantly evolving and I believe that this is great. Technology is so beneficial to the everyday person, students, businesses, and basically everyone. I prefer using technology for anything that it can be used to do. I prefer Microsoft to Apple, just because Microsoft has a much cleaner, user-friendly interface. I do however think Apple did make the Iphone as the best phone on the market! Like I said earlier I am what you consider a gamer, I started out with the Nitendo 64, DreamCast, Playsation 1, 2, 3, Xbox 360 and now the Playstation 4. Which Playstation is by far my favorite system to play on. I believe that technology has benefits for everyone everyday, including medicine, education, and much more. This is why I am very supportive of technology. Technology is bettering the economy of today. We use technology to make products that we buy for a lot cheaper than when it is made by hand. Technology also benefits research such as in the research project I will be doing this summer. I also love the communicational benefits of today’s technology. Like how I can keep in touch with all my friends and family every single day within seconds not days. I use Facebook as well as Twitter “@Thack25”. I believe that the majority of people today use technology today, and they don’t even realize how dependent our society is on technology. My best example of this is where I work at a grocery store, when my registers mess up my cashiers don’t know how much change to give back and everything, so I find that kind of sad how reliant we are on technology but it is a good thing as well. As I was saying being born in the 90’s I am very technologically savvy and I believe that technology betters our society as well as our daily lives.

My Views on Wikipedia
I discovered Wikipedia a long time ago, I don’t remember when, but I’ve been using Wikipedia to help me write research papers throughout my educational career. Although the teachers would say NEVER use Wikipedia, I would because I knew the information was correct after doing additional research along it. I do find most Wikipedia articles boring, mundane, and very wordy. People try to write articles with no emotional attachment and this makes some of them quite frankly suck because everyone has attachment to what that write about. I feel that if everyone wrote truly how they wanted to write about the topic people would be much more interested in the topic. Schools for example, they shouldn’t be articles that just list the name, price, etc. they should be articles that include student quotes, names of events, societies and etc. as well as pictures. People don’t want their research to be boring, and this is why most people don’t do their research properly. I feel as if Wikipedia could be used to make research interesting and not mundane as it has been in the past. I also find the rules of Wikipedia a bit odd. I don’t get why people who just make a lot of edits, and deletions become administrators when there are people who do one or two full scale edits and get no reward for their hours of work as opposed to 5 minutes of someone clicking delete. I love Wikipedia though I am just starting to become a member of the site and going to make contributions. I enjoy that I started out using the site for research, but now I am able to contribute to the site. I plan on using Wikipedia as long as it exists, and I hope to make some very good attributions to the site.