 Making my life count I think is somehow finding a way to give voice to the voiceless through art and education and figuring a way that my voice can add to that conversation is something that I'm striving for. There's so much good that I think is inherent with what it means to just go about our daily lives and go about our daily business and we fixate unfortunately on the negative. And in that way we need art and we need moments of levity and education to sort of like wrap our heads around this insane kind of world because we're just trying to make it up as we go along. Gustavus provides a lot of platforms for figuring out who and what I might need to be, want to be, what I could become and I joined a social justice theater group and I was on a football team and I was in a choir and I was learning about histories and learning about what stories I represent and what stories I've been made to represent and the gusty way of like being a gusty and that sort of transcending all reality. Once I left Gustavus I had to really do that again and trying to explain that so I just sort of tried to become something that was of excellence and that was of creativity and striving. Maria Tierney gave me the option. She opened up the door. I had again a liberal arts education. My general requirements were things like poetry and anthropology, religion so I had to take some sort of art credit and it was between drawing and dance and I couldn't draw so I decided to take a dance class. Fundamentals are modern. I got in touch with my body and as an athlete I was already thinking I was in touch with my body. So then I took the next course and at one point I don't even know what just happened. I think she was just like off the cuffs like you should think about doing this and I was like I should think about doing what and she was like dance and at that time I had no idea that dance could even be a career, could be a profession so again in that naive sensibility I was like alright clear to major and that's what happened. Maria Tierney just gave me the option where I didn't have it before. I'm Brian J. Evans and I'm a gusty. Gustavus Adolphus College. Make your life count.