February 26th, 2021

Who the hell are you?

Picture someone who wakes up every morning and resolves to run further, jump higher, and fight harder than he did yesterday. He’s gotten his hair cut short his whole life, but he’s decided to see how he looks with longer locks as of late. He loves driving up city roads on warm afternoons with the music loud and the windows open. He hates letting people down more than anything else. Sometimes, he runs his mouth a little and gets into trouble as a result.

Surprise! That someone is me. I’ve got my doubts and worries, and there are some things I wish I could change about myself. But at the end of the day, I’m stuck being myself, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

What's this site to you?

This writing portfolio is my first foray into the unfamiliar world of urban planning, land management, environmental conservation, politics, and governance. My writing this quarter has taken me all around the Bay Area to see things with my own eyes, and all across the Internet in search of information. This portfolio is just the first step in what will probably become a long journey of learning and personal growth, a journey that’ll help me become a smarter citizen and a more well-rounded human. In addition to that, this portfolio has also functioned as a place for me to improve a little bit at web coding. This site is hosted on a student account with Weebly for Education, which imposes a bunch of limitations on what unpaid users are allowed to do, but I’ve been trying my best to force workarounds all throughout the quarter to achieve the look I want with the site.

Anything else to know about you?

In my spare time, I love to listen to, arrange, play, and produce music. Not a single waking hour passes where I don’t think about music. Besides that, I also enjoy b-boying, clean, tasteful, action-packed anime, and computer programming, but only when my code doesn't crash. And I won’t ever turn you down for a good round of Super Smash Bros. On weekends, you can find me working my heavy bag in my backyard or burning my kitchen down butter-basting a sirloin steak.

Be more specific.

I'm Ray. I've lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly my entire life, and I love it here. I’m an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis, working towards a major in biochemistry and molecular biology and a minor in computer science. This writing portfolio is for UWP 101Y, an upper division writing course I'm taking this quarter.

I’ve been all over the place and seen a whole lot of stuff. From studying protein complexes involved in meiotic recombination in a university lab, to street performing on the Embarcadero, to journeying to remote Chinese villages miles from civilization to teach English to disadvantaged students. One place I haven't really been and don't know much about, though, is the U.S. government. For a while, I've been completely clueless about how our nation is run. And that's part of the reason this website exists.

What's next for you?

 I am a student right now, and I'm studying hard, but that doesn't mean that I've got no qualms with the way schools are. There are many aspects of the educational system that I strongly believe need to change. Certain groups of people face much greater educational hardships than others. Teachers aren't paid nearly enough. And in universities, there's so much red tape, so little academic integrity, so many nonsensical requirements, no flexibility, and no freedom. In fact, one of the reasons why I've enjoyed UWP 101Y so much was because it gave me the freedom to choose a topic I was interested in learning about and deeply investigate it for an entire quarter. I want to promote that kind of liberating, engaging, world-changing learning. I envision myself pursuing a career having to do with education because I believe I can help contribute to a future that’s so much better for all students than what we've got right now.