Whole Life Concepts and Discipline

Mark Stickles

Whole Life Concepts Part 1 Don Blackmon September 12, 2012 I have neither given nor received any unauthorized help on this assignment, nor witnessed any violation of the UNC Charlotte Code of Academic Integrity.

9/12/2012

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Passion Passion is defined as a strong and barely controllable emotion. My passion is to make the world a better place for my children and the worlds children. One of my favorite quotes is a Native American proverb that states: Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. This quote tells me to always look at the bigger picture, which drives my passion to succeed in what I do. I have had this passion ever since my dad told me that his dad gave him the chance at a better life than the one he had, now he was giving me a better chance than he had and he hopes I continue to do this for my children; which is exactly what I plan on doing. Passion is what prompts organisms to get things done. You have to put passion into the tasks you are given everyday. Without passion you lose interest in completing jobs and finishing projects. My passion drives me to do things faster and better than I usually do them. I want to be able to support my children in everything they want to accomplish and if that is hopefully going to Harvard or interning in another country, I will support them all the way. I do not just do this for my children, I do it because I want my dad to feel the same way I will feel when my children accomplish something. I am capable of doing anything that I put my mind to as long as I want to do it. As for my attitude, if I dont want to do something I rarely will but if I do it will get done. I can carry a workload as well as the next guy. What really makes me realize this is the fact that I do better when I have more work than when I have less because the more pinned down I am the more I want to get up. My definition of passion is defined by what has to happen in order to get the best possible outcome for everyone. Passion starts from what you believe in, that ranges from something as complex as politics to your basic definition of what is right and wrong. Passion is individual and unique to each persons likes and dislikes. Passion is what makes a football player jump the extra inch to catch the ball to score the winning touchdown. It is what drives the husband to drive around before Christmas to find the present that everyone else is sold out of. In part, everyone that has been involved in my life whether his or her impact is small or large, they have affected my passion. For example, my mother makes me want to treat women with respect and my grandfather makes me want to treat everyone else with respect. Everyone says respect is earned, those are just words until you put them into action. Respect is a big part of my passion because what do you mean to the world if no one respects you. Values are what drive your passion. My father did not finish college when he was my age. He could not get the grades to pass and was forced to leave even after trying different colleges. My father did not give up though because he knew he had a family to support. While I was very young he went to night school to become a civil engineer not only because his passion was to build things but also was to protect his family as is mine. Although I did not experience in a way because I was too small to remember this story drives me every time I hear the word engineering. When you first tour the engineering program here they give you they statistics of all the dropouts and the people that switch majors. My father came to every single one of my soccer games as a child. Whether he was standing there on the sideline as a screaming parent or a cautious coach, you could always see him. He pushed me when I just wanted to sit there and not run anymore and it made me better. His passion was for me to be great and his passion I absorbed into mine. I wanted to be great for him. The college decision I had to make first was the major I wanted to devote four years of my life to studying. He let me pick the school I wanted to go to and study whatever I wanted. I knew I wanted to be an engineer like my father but I was never very sure about the civil discipline. My passion as I said earlier has been; to be there or know that I did everything I could to prevent people from being harmed. Then I discovered Fire Protection Engineering. You have never seen a more excited man than my father when I told him I was accepted into the Fire Protection Engineering discipline at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. All he wanted to do was tell me what not to do in college and how not to make the same mistakes he did and how he knew that I could do this if I put my mind to it. In a way you could say that I am doing this for him, but I believe it is for both of us, because my passion involved us both being satisfied and I believe this program at this school in the Freshman Learning Community achieves both of our goals. It was passion that allowed me to fill out those essays and take the SATs. It was his passion that helped me financially to follow what I wanted to do. That is my understanding of passion. Everyone has their own experiences that shape their passions. Some could have, for example, lost someone dear to them to a medical disease with no cure so their passion is to become a doctor and make sure no one else suffers the same fate. Another case could be if someone has a passion to drive cars faster than the next person, he will use this passion to be the best and nothing less. If you have a passion for something, my advice to you is to focus yourself on it until you complete all your goals. It takes passion to get where I have gotten and it will take passion to get where I want to go.

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Impact

My broad main goal that is the heading for all my others is that I want to make an impact on the world by decreasing the number of fire related deaths every year. The number is way to high for something as old as fire. We have some catching up to do but it does not just have to do with engineers, it also is politics. What happens when a builder has the option to include sprinklers in a house but it will cost a little extra and is not required. Almost every single one of them will choose the cheaper option, which most of the time is not the safest. I believe I can improve the industry in more than three different ways. The three different ways I believe I can make use of my passion is by contributing to building design to create safer exits and more fire resistant layouts, studying human behavior during fire, and designing fire suppression systems. Building design is a big part of fire engineering. There can be damage such as charring, which is fairly obvious, or thermal expansion and loss of strength. I want to create a building that has the right layout where these are not options (besides charring, I can not see a way around that). The design of buildings can be changed to withstand most fires with a little more technology and money. This will be a big part of my passion because it will let me combine things that I want to do. Human behavior has always been fascinating to me, whether it is how the average human reacts in fire or how a human reacts to seeing cake. Before I wanted to become an engineer I guess like all children I wanted to be a police officer. I always tested my ability to read people and took pride in it. There is so much you can do with a fire degree that has to do with the law or working for the government. In order to design fire suppression systems you have to have the passion to create an idea that will change the way fire is handled. Look at past innovations, the smoke detector, the carbon monoxide detector, and indoor sprinkler systems just to name the first three that came to mind. Each one has saved countless lives and will continue to save countless more. Can you imagine still saving lives even after you have died? That is the ultimate safety invention and I want to implement it to save many peoples lives. It is up there with seatbelts, locks and alarm systems. My job will be to take my passion, and using that, I will have the opportunity to change the world for the better. Wildfires are a huge topic in todays academic discussion on fire safety. The fires of today are bigger and stronger than ever before and it is our fault that this has happened. A megafire is defined as a blaze that burns over 10,000 acres of land. These fires used to be rare enough that they would be measured my decades. Well that might have to change soon since those numbers have grown seven times the amount of the fires in the 1970s. If my passion is to stop fires like this from destroying homes and lives, this is a great challenge. This issue has so many external and internal effects it is hard to calculate them all without experiencing the devastation first hand. Hundreds of homes were destroyed and thousands of residents have already been forced to evacuate in this years fire season (Zuckerman 2012). This is a problem that needs to be addressed immediately, and cannot be handled lightly. It needs a solution so that this problem can stop festering and the people that own the land around the hot zones. If I was able to impact this goal then if I decide to raise a family in a hot zone my passion to protect them will be successful. Many people die because they unplug their smoke detectors and carbon monoxide alarms. The article I read on this, said that five people died because of the lack of a smoke detector in a house. The last time this family was checked for smoke alarms was in October and the fire occurred in February. They were declared sufficient in October so why were they not in there when the fire started? This is the issue that I want to address. People find smoke detectors to be an annoying distraction, yet they are only there for your safety. Most people, when it is time to change the battery in their detectors just take it out because they do not have the batteries and just want to silence the beeping. The fire in this home was started in the kitchen and could have been detected faster and the family could have been saved because they would have been able to leave their bedroom before the first floor was encased with flames (Schweber 2012). Arson is one of the oldest crimes. It was around before guns and continues to be a big part of our modern society. The technology of the modern age has changed the way we view arson all together. You now can take digital images and input them into a computer program with burn rates and heat release to surfaces. This part of fire protection allows me to be the part cop that I always wanted to be while studying the habits of fire. Arson causes losses of about 3.6 billion dollars each year according to the United States Fire Association. That number is extremely too high and the smartest way to attack the problem is through research about fire. Very limited research has been done by federal agencies to address fire investigation (Madrzykowski 2000). I want to make an impact in this science and come up with the next way to investigate fire, which hopefully will bring down the number of arson attempts. The arson community can always be improved and I hope to make an impact in it to help improve the rest of the world

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Knowledge, Skills and Abilities Knowledge is what I hope to gain from the higher courses as the curriculum hardens. I will need leadership skills some of which I feel I already possess. Common sense in my opinion is not all that common. Common sense can make or break an intelligent engineer. I will need to know the burn rates of common materials, how fire spreads, how people react to dangerous situations, politics to receive research grants, and how to make firefighting safer or how to prevent most house fires. Burn rates will be useful in every type of fire safety ranging from arson investigation to calming wildfires. They will tell you how hot something will burn or how long it will last. Fire spreads in a very particular pattern that has been studied for generations and I hope to learn these patterns so that I can follow the flame back to its source and find out how it started or what made it end. As I stated before human behavior has always fascinated me, and I want to have all the knowledge about this particular topic as I can because this will help me do my job and even possibly get a job. This topic extends father than just uses in science. Politics is a huge part of almost every job, whether it is getting money to do research or just doing the job right, the long arm of politics can reach very far and there is much knowledge that can be gained. Making firefighting safer is the goal of almost every fire protection engineer. It is in their name, whether it is preventing the fire from starting at all or alerting them as soon as it does. The technology that involved analyzing and preventing fire has come so far and has so much farther to come. The job field for a fire protection engineer is wide open. The jobs are in high demand because the field is so small; very few schools have the major. The first job that caught my eye when I was researching was to be a Fire Protection Engineer for the Department of the Army at Fort Shafter, Hawaii. The starting salary ranged from $72,234.00 to $93,300 per year with excellent government benefits. They offer comprehensive health and life insurance, retirement programs, paid holidays, sick leave, and vacation time, possible student loan repayment, as well as other bonuses and incentives. They are going to rate you within three basic categories if you are qualified: qualified, highly qualified, and best qualified. I would be evaluated on my skills in resolving complex fire protection engineering problems, my knowledge of building and construction, of engineering laws, legal codes, government regulations, design principles, techniques, and procedures. For this particular job the applicant must possess one year of specialized experience of the lower level of the job he or she is applying for. They will need the applicant to visit construction sites to investigate different situations, to provide Fire Protection Engineering assistance and guidance, and maybe reviewing proposals having to do with Fire Protection Engineering from other contractors (Army 2012). The Argonne National Laboratory is also looking for a Fire Protection Engineer where they would need the applicant to perform assessments on buildings or systems for any new or old facilities. The salary for this particular job is not listed to the public, but it does have the hours you would work having been accepted, which are 8:30 to 5 on the weekdays. The pay cycle would be monthly. The minimum education or experience requirements for this job is just to have a Bachelors Degree; no previous work experience is required. You will need to be able to speak and write in good communication and be able to maintain effective work relationships. You should be efficient with Microsoft Office and solid knowledge of the National Fire Protection Association Code. You should have some knowledge of other disciplines as well as building codes, health, safety, and environmental practices (Labratory 2012). The program at Denuke needs a Fire Protection Engineer to review transient combustible requests, be able to interface with different groups to solve fire protection related problems, and use fire impairments. The salary is open and the required education is a Bachelors Degree. The location of the job is in Seneca, SC. They would like to have someone with at least three years of experience (Denuke 2012). Most of the job descriptions are the same for this concentration. The completion of my schooling in this major should properly prepare me for the outside world and most of these jobs. As my skills and abilities evolve into knowledge I will be able to be highly qualified if I apply myself to the fullest extent. Next Steps The major I am considering is called Fire Protection Engineering. My decision grew stronger the more I talked about my passion and the job opportunities with their descriptions and locations. I realized that engineering is exactly what my passion is and I will pursue the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in this field. The concerns I have is always knowing the safety procedures and having people look to me for answers that have to be right because my job depends on it. It is going to take hard work to get to the spot I want to be in 15 or so years, my concern is that everything I learn now will have to stay with me for the rest of my life because my job requires it. I intend to explore these questions over time with the support of my

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engineering professors and their experience that will allow me to make the right decisions when the time comes. My passion overall is to help the world and the people closest to me both in the present and in the hopeful future. This passion is going to be the driving force behind everything I do because without it I am doing something without wanting to which is for me like not doing it at all. I will use my passion to develop new ideas and to create an impact on the world around me. This major fits perfectly in line with my individual passions. My major will be the reason I continue to work hard in school and future jobs. The reason is because I am doing something that I want to do, that I will wake up every morning and be thankful that I am doing, because if you are not then you should switch jobs, life is not long enough to have to stay with something you do not enjoy. Having a job that enquires my passion will be ideal because I will be able to go to work knowing I like my job.

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Works Cited Argonne National Library. 2012. Careers. Argonne National Laboratory. Accessed September 19. http://web.anl.gov/jobsearch/detail.jsp?userreqid=319785+FMS&lsBrowse=ALL. Denuke. 2012. "Employment." Denuke. Accessed September 19. http://search1.smartsearchonline.com/ denuke/jobs/jobdetails.asp?jobnumber=1172&sourcename=Indeed.

Department of the Army. 2012. "Agency Job Opportunity Announcement." USAJOBS. Accessed September 19. https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/325472700. Madrzykowski, Daniel. 2000. "The Future of Fire Protection." InterFire. Accessed September 19. http://www.interfire.org/pdf/Madrzykowski.pdf. Schweber, Nate. 2012. No Smoke Detectors Found Where 5 Were Killed in Fire. New York Times. Accessed September 18. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/nyregion/after-fatal-new-jersey-fire-nosign-of-smoke-detectors.html?r=1. Zuckerman, Laura. 2012. U.S. Western Wildfires Report Says Region Should Expect Bigger Burns More Often. Huffington Post. Accessed September 19. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/19/us -western-wildfires-report_n_1895462.html?utm_hp_ref=green.