 My wife and I have always tried to stay connected to what our children were doing in school. When you maintain that communication with your children, you're going to hear the education that they're receiving. And I've really taken that to heart. I think that if I want to know my child, I want to know his world. While the best way to get plugged into Cal as a parent is to participate in Cal Parents. Now that I've been through it, I wanted to let other mothers and fathers know that this is a great place for your student. One of the things we love to do is to meet new parents at Move-in Day, where we also, of course, meet our new students. We see the amazing excitement that you all feel when you bring your children here to Berkeley for their college experience. We also see the anxiety and the nervousness about letting your children go, but they're in great hands. We know you want to stay connected with this campus when you send your children here, whether they're undergraduates or graduate students. The Cal Parents program provides all kinds of opportunities for you to do that. For you to connect with the academic programs here as well as the extraordinary range of opportunities that exist, not just for your students, but for yourselves on this magnificent campus. Cal is unique because it has everything. There are lots of schools that are really good at engineering or really good at the arts. But Cal is a place where no matter what it is you're interested in, somebody here is doing it really well. Everything is so different and so good and that's what benefits us is that we draw from this diverse group here. As we grow we continue to build off that and that's what makes it great here. The theme of excellence I think definitely does encompass everything. It's really funny because the thing that people always say is where you are from you were the best in your school. And so UC Berkeley is kind of like that center, that epicenter of all these excellent people coming together. And so you kind of feed off of that, you get the best students, you get the best professors. You know, this is really one of the greatest universities, not just in California, not just in the United States, but in the entire world. It routinely gets rankings in the top five for virtually every field. When we invite your children to come here for their education, they can participate in really some of the most cutting edge research and some of the most extraordinary educational opportunities available anywhere in the world. I'm a professor in residence in Christian Hall, which is in unit one. The faculty in residence program is a program that brings faculty to live in residence halls with undergraduate students. We serve as mentors, guides and friends. The professors are busy and have research, but if you sit down with them and you go to their office hours, they really want to help people learn and they want to make your education as meaningful as possible. So every experience I've had with going to office hours and meeting up with teachers has been beyond what I expected. The faculty at Berkeley are phenomenal, right? So even in a large lecture course, students are getting the cutting edge of the field. I think it's really up to the student to search out all the resources that Cal has to offer. It's very easy to make Cal kind of smaller. It's that thing I'm sure you've heard it so many times. You know, you can make a big school smaller, but you can't make a small school bigger. I was an undergraduate here. I was taking courses from faculty members who had written the books, right, who had written the textbooks. And what that meant for me was that I started to think, wow, so creating theory is what people do. And so it kind of in some ways humanizes the research process and the theory-building process that allows you to think, well, maybe I could create theory too. Cal Parents is fabulous and we have, I'm proud to be a part of it because we funded so many amazing things, like freshman seminars, which are this marvelous opportunity. Freshman seminars are 15 students getting together with a faculty member once a week to work on something interesting. So I'm teaching a freshman seminar this semester on the physics and technology of siege engines, things like catapults and trebuchets. Put some minions together to see if you can build those triangles. And there are clamps in there to clamp them before you screw them and glue. I love teaching at Cal. I love the undergrads. I love the graduate students. I love everything about it. Seminars are not meant to be one person talking to a bunch of others. They're a bunch of people working together to improve their understanding. You know, we're not going to win a Nobel Prize for freshman seminar work, but we are going to learn something as individuals. We're going to learn something as a team. And we're going to teach students that curiosity is a big part of learning. Well, I've been involved with Cal Parents since the year 2000. I was in Sprawl Hall walking around and I saw this door and said, Cal Parents. So I thought, I'm just going to walk in here. So the Cal Parents program is a great way for parents to stay connected when their child joins the university. Cal Parents is a program at Berkeley designed to support families and have families become a part of the Cal experience. There's resources at the Cal Parents website. There's a Facebook site. There's newsletters home. There's volunteering opportunities that can bring you to campus, but you also can volunteer in efforts that happen in Southern California and you can meet other parents that way. I love the Discover Cal programs because in Southern California it connects me and I feel like I can hear that professor talking about Egypt or talking about this particular environmental issue that's current in the news today and it's not very far. I think what's nice about Cal Parents is that we can respond immediately to issues that are hot on the table and we're very connected to what's going on on campus. I'm more engaged on the fundraising side. I think it's very, very important for the parents to recognize that Cal today needs the kind of financial support that the private schools have in order to stay competitive. I felt like I have to fight for what is so wonderful. I don't want it to go away. I've had two kids attend Berkeley. It's been a wonderful experience for both of them. I am a new Cal parent. My daughter started here this spring and she is having a blast. I was the only one that I could say it. It's a marvelous experience. A sometimes an overwhelming experience. Sometimes an experience that makes a dad really, really nervous. When your daughter tells you she's majoring in Celtic studies your first reaction is going to be, what the hell are you going to do with that? My biggest piece of advice is to let your kids lead the process and trust that you've done a fabulous job and they're ready. Advice parent to parent having had one daughter graduate and another one about to relax. It's an amazing world. Your kids are going to go through incredible experiences that you can't conceive of. Let them do it. It's going to be okay.