Dear Readers,
My name is Joe Millspaw, I am a transfer student returning to class after a five-year hiatus. During that time, I have traveled the country, lived in some really cool places, including Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, and met some of the most amazing people anyone could hope to meet. Working in Yellowstone Park was an amazing experience and I lived in and around the park for 4 years, I managed a towing and repair facility during the summer, working directly with law enforcement and park visitors to salvage as many vacations as possible, whether it was a minor repair or a major accident that needed to be recovered I was the lead tow truck operator in the surrounding areas and would get called out at all hours of the day and night. In the winter I was a winter-keeper, my job was to clear snow from the roofs of the buildings, collect reports from the gas pumps and perform maintenance as required for the whole of the park. During that winter I took up several new hobbies including a blog on my experiences in the cold mountain season. It was an eye -opening experience being alone in the wilderness for about four months surrounded by the Yellowstone wildlife without a person within 100 miles of me as it was during a government shutdown. One of my favorite experiences of my life was on a random morning in late January, I was on the roof of one of the empty dorm buildings clearing the snow and minding my own business. About an hour into my work, I stopped to adjust my jacket and look around and I realized there were four wolves watching me from the clearing where the parking lot would have been if there wasn’t any snow. The wolves sat there and watched me for about fifteen minutes and I was perfectly content to wait for them to leave without leaving the safety of my rooftop as my snowmobile was about fifty yards away. The experience left me with a new sense of wonder and the fresh realization that I was completely alone and needed to be more aware of my surroundings.
I am currently employed full time as a technician at Fred Anderson Toyota where my duties include maintaining and repairing all sorts of cars and equipment, writing Developmental Product Reports or DPR’s, and communicating with the quality control board, so I do have some experience creating detailed reports on product quality and malfunction symptoms on Toyota vehicles. So naturally I am most knowledgeable about cars and the systems involved, but I consider myself pretty well educated. I didn’t read very often until I was in my early teens. Being homeschooled I was pretty much self-taught and my favorite subject was math and it wasn’t until I started to study history that I realized I liked to read. After that I would read anything I could get my hands on from fantasies to biographies. I always gravitated towards ancient or medieval history, such as Caesar’s Gallic War and Homer’s Iliad.
History is my favorite subject to study and I enjoy learning about medieval Europe and Asia particularly the rise and fall of empires and dynasties from different eras. Some things I enjoy considering are the different factors that motivated some historic figures like Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, or his grandson Kublai Khan. What made them so ambitious and how did
their journeys begin? I think questions like these are the reason I enjoy history as apposed to other genres, the speculation feels more grounded than trying to draw conclusions about fictional characters whose motives may be poorly written if flushed out at all. On the other hand, my favorite form of writing is poetry. The great poets were able to conjure such beautiful imagery and emotion while still telling a progressive story. A prime example is Lepanto by the late G.K. Chesterton. His elegant rhyme and driving cadence make it a powerful story about a bastard prince who commanded the Spanish fleet to a massive victory over the Ottoman empire.
My first-time attending college I went for an associate degree program in automotive technology at Alfred State in NY. This course was very rudimentary and I only ever had one writing assignment, I chose to write about the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. My teachers only requirement was that the paper had to be double spaced and I was docked 20 points for not knowing what that meant and putting two spaces between each word. Most of our time was spent discussing the structure of the automotive industry and practicing disassembling components. It was a very hands-on approach and it has served me well through my professional career as a mechanic, but I am ready to move on and try new things. When I first graduated and started working in the automotive field I really enjoyed working on cars, but after a few years the novelty wore off and I realized that it isn’t for me. My goal is to get a bachelors in computer science with a minor in business and then go for my masters in software engineering. I have a lot of things to learn before I can achieve those goals, not least of which is learning to write. I have always struggled with writing assignments particularly with structure and layout.
Coming to UNCA this spring is an amazing opportunity and I am very grateful for my friends and family for supporting me as well as my employer for working with my schedule. I am very excited to get to know my classmates and learn as much as I can over the next four years. This course will hopefully prove instrumental in the continuation of my education and I hope to become a much more creative writer, researcher and story teller. I look forward to learning and growing my skills over the course of my career.
Sincerely, Joe