Welcome to My ePortfolio

My name is Mathew Potts and welcome to my electronic portfolio! This portfolio will illustrate my general education and elective courses at SLCC (Salt Lake Community College). It also contains my various goal, some learning outside the classroom, and my resume. Feel free to look around and see what I have been doing.

About Me

          Who are we? It is a question that we are constantly asked by teachers, friends, and ourselves. Although it is impossible to sum up all a persons accomplishments and trials throughout their life, you can give a rough framework of what brought you to be who you are today. We are all products of our society, and what experiences we have chosen to shape us. This is who I am, a combination of experiences that have propelled me through this roller coaster called life.
            My first major life changing experience came in 2002, when I moved from my California to Utah. Although I was young at the time I felt like my world was crumbling around me. It was a fresh new start. Fortunately, a nerdy kid wearing a puffy orange winter coat came up to talk to me and introduced me to his friends. In doing this, he gave me the tools to become who I am today. He is still my best friend to this day.
            I have had many aspirations of what career I want throughout my life. From paleontologist to marine biologist, professional pilot to my current major in physics with a minor in astronomy. Science to me makes sense, it takes the mysticism and chaos out of the world. I want to understand how the world works, more specifically how the cosmos works as a whole. We are part of this cosmos, just as much as the cosmos is part of us. 

Audio taken from Carl Sagan's audiobook, "Pale Blue Dot"

Favorite Quote...

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
     The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
     The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
                                        -Dr. Carl Sagan on Oct. 13, 1994 during a
                                                   public lecture at Cornell University