'I lose my keys, like, once a day'

Diego Barros has always liked building things.

"I've always liked Legos, loved taking old VCRs apart to see how they worked and put them back together, take the little motors from them and attach them to other things," the UAA sophomore said.

That love of tinkering eventually helped Barros make a difficult choice.

"When it came time to decide what I was going to study in college, I decided that although I love to do art, I'm not going to get paid doing art," Barros said. "But, if I get a degree in mechanical engineering, I can use my mechanical engineering experience to create beautiful things that are functional as well."

Where the mountains touch the water

Barros' mother, snowboarder Elke Barnes, from Alaska, met Diego's father while competing in Chile. They lived in Chile and began raising their son there, but Barnes wasn't happy so far from home and friends.

"It was hard to find friends down in Chile because they've got a different social dynamic," Barros said.

Classes don't split up as they do here, so friends you make in kindergarten are still your friends in high school.

"You stick with your core group of friends throughout life; you don't go out to find new friends," Barros said. "So when she was down there with no friends, it was hard for her, so she brought Dad up to the states. My Dad had the same problem up here. It was just love not meant to be. He's back down there."

Every year, Barros travels 8,096 miles to South America to see his father and his father's family in Chile.

"It's where the mountains touch the water," he said. "The entire country is where the mountains touch the water."

The country held between the Pacific Ocean, Atacama Desert and the meandering spine of the Andes range extends 2,700 miles north and south and, east to west, is quite narrow-no more than 150 miles wide. The country encloses incredible diversity-vineyards and farms in the north, primeval forests and lakes in the south, a host of fish farms and people enjoying 90-degree weather on a coast seamed with frigid Antarctic currents.

"As you get further down it looks like Germany," Barros said. "There were a lot of Germans that emigrated during World War II, so there's a lot of German architecture and German people. As you go further south, it's quite a lot like Kodiak, I would say. That's what the climate is like-rainy, windy-but it's a warm rain compared to Alaska rain."

Barros tries to visit Chile every year.

"I can't handle a full winter up here," he said. "I've tried! So every winter I fly down to Chile where it's nice and warm and sunny."

While in Chile, Barros lives in the Santiago metropolitan area, in the city of Vitacura ("VitaCOOra"). His family is well off compared to others. "There's much more disparity there between the rich and poor," he said. While in Chile, he goes to the beach, eats, runs and spends time practicing gymnastics with friends he first met at a park in Santiago.

"There's a 2-mile-by-4-block park that's mostly grass, but right in the center there's a giant playground with sand as the base," he said. "I got into [gymnastics] because I found a couple of guys at the park throwing back flips and said, 'Hey, want to teach me?' That's where a lot of my friends come from. I learned more in the month I was hanging out with the kids at the park than the rest of my life."

Exploring new paths

Back when Barros was growing up in Girdwood, Barros' mother and her husband, Gideon Saunders, frequently took Barros up on the slopes of Alyeska.

"They taught me how to ski first, when I was 4 or 5," he said. "They said it is easier to learn how to snowboard if you know how to ski first. Then I knew the mountain, knew how to ski, so they gave me a snowboard when I was 7. I was very stubborn and didn't let my parents teach me, so it took longer to learn than it should have, but it really didn't take me long at all because I lived two blocks from Alyeska and had a season pass."

Barros said his mother used to love racing but settled down and grew into exploring the backcountry on skis. He likes that, too.

"All of my friends liked to go to the ski parks and throw back flips, do tricks," he said. "But I definitely love to explore the mountain more than either of those, so I would go to wherever I could find fresh snow and explore. By the time I was 10, I was going over the whole mountain, hitting the north face regularly."

Barros says he attended eight schools-in Alaska and Chile-before arriving at UAA.

"I'd been homeschooled before and would wake at 6, do four hours of school and then go snowboarding," he said of one of one of those academic experiences. "Going from that to a school that is basically preparatory for college, where I was going to school for eight hours and doing four hours of homework was harsh, jarring. It didn't work for me."

Getting where he wants to be

Barros packed together a formidable schedule once he arrived at UAA-full of AutoCAD, calculus, chemistry, physics. He enjoys math-being given a problem and, without prior skills in that field, solving that problem.

"I like deriving formulas," he said. "Good math teachers, all the way back in algebra, will teach you to derive algebra from what you already know. That's better than telling people, 'Here are the formulas.' That's why physics is a lot of fun. That is what physics is. What every physics teacher I've had has done is write down, 'Force equals mass times acceleration,' on the board and then say, 'All right, this is our equation, let's move forward. With just that, we'll derive all the other formulas for motion. We start with a formula, have a problem, change the formula to get where we want to be."

Shouldering a science- and math-heavy schedule sometimes has a down side, however.

"My huge problem is not managing my time well," he said. "I lose my keys, like, once a day. My room's always dirty. With chemistry lab, if you don't turn in the pre-lab on time, you don't get to do the lab. It's due Tuesday at 5; there's no negotiating that. I'd finish it over the weekend, say I'd turn it in while I was in the building and then Tuesday at 4:55, I'd say, 'Oh, shoot! I didn't turn in my chemistry pre-lab!' Bad time management has set me up for failure, but I'm working on that."

Barros says writing is difficult for him. Nevertheless, he decided to try writing for The Northern Light as its arts and entertainment editor.

"I've always been a terrible writer," he said. "It usually takes me two or three weeks to write just a one-page paper because I keep getting distracted. It's hard to sit myself down and actually finish writing something. It's hard to keep up with deadlines because it takes me a week to write a paper."

He once wrote a piece called 'Chronicles of Yarnia,' a 1,000-word horoscope in celebration of Carl Sagan Day.

"It's what I'm most proud of," he said. "I had a preexisting knowledge about astronomy that helped me write it much quicker than, say, writing about country music singer Tim McGraw. 'He had pretty cool pants'... and then I erased that and thought, 'That was terrible! What was I thinking!'"

Barros says there are many things he still hopes to explore but hasn't worked hard enough to get good at.

"I like to sing, like to act, make all sorts of music," he said. "I like to perform. I'm good on stage, I have a good stage presence. I think that's why I won 'Mr. UAA.'"

Barros donned a faux beard when he won that title, since he and his fellow competitors had cringed at the idea of sashaying across a stage with tiaras in their hair.

During the competition, he delivered a mesmerizing explanation of how his "Bill Nye the Science Guy" look encourages him to grow toward his goal of educating people in science. And, he belted out Ed Sheeran's "Wayfaring Stranger."

"I forgot the words a third of the way through," he laughed. "Pretty embarrassing. But at least I went up there and did something!"

Now, Barros is embarking on a new adventure: Moving to Utah. Sigma Sigma Sigma members voted to pass the Mr. UAA title to runner-up Dominic Fisk: "This doesn't mean that we're stripping Diego from his title," said June Skinner, who oversees the sorority's website and social media. "It just simply means that the runner-up is taking his place to ensure that we have someone available as a public figure on campus for Mr. UAA."

Written by Tracy Kalytiak, UAA Office of University Advancement