David Redding is a first-year graduate student who received his bachelors at Miami University last spring and is studying Mechanical Engineering. He is also a Division 1 athlete on the football team and plans to finish his masters degree by spring 2023.

Redding completed his undergraduate education with a major in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Computer Science

Outside of school and football, Redding is interested in technology, and built a home server for tinkering with home automation applications and a plex server for movies over winter break. He also enjoys building Legos and playing video games in his spare time.

Before high school, Redding didn’t have a chance to play football because he was home-schooled and never had the opportunity, but started playing once he was in his freshman year of high school. In total, Redding has played football for nine years.

Redding’s biggest challenge in college was learning how to study and prepare for college courses, taking him about three semesters to understand how he needed to prepare for classes and exams, as well as how to develop the discipline necessary to achieve the results he wanted.

“Understanding that mastery of the material comes from repetition and doing more example problems in the back of a textbook helped my exam scores increase dramatically,” Redding said.

Redding gives credit to his father for being his biggest inspiration. His father has helped coach his thinking process and in developing the study habits that brought to Redding’s success. His father used to talk to him about how he struggled in college until he developed study habits and, after mastering the material during the semester, the grades naturally followed.

Redding believes that, because of his hard work in both academics and athletics, the last five years have paid off.

“When I was in high school, my father would always make the comment about who I was competing against. ‘You can be average and just settle for following the crowd, you can be the best of the crowd and compete against your peers, or you can be the best version of you God intended you to be and compete against yourself and always strive to be better than yesterday.’ It has been something that I have always thought about and something that fuels my motivation,” Redding said in appreciation for his father’s helpful advice.

This past semester, Redding reached out to the student health clinical services and talked about his various struggles that he had been facing about academics and athletics for several years. This helped him tremendously, helping him look at issues from a different perspective and plan on how to handle them in the future.

When asked about advice he had for future engineers, Redding said his biggest advice would be to quickly develop the study habits that you need to succeed in the engineering discipline. He also advised that future athletes learn to manage their time in order to succeed, as the commitment for sports can be time-consuming.

Written by Gabby Benedict, CEC Reporter