 Hey this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat and I'm talking today with Kate. Hey, Kate, great to see you. Hi, really great to be with you. So folks, I don't know who you are, where you are, what you do. Why don't you give us the the background. All right, my name is Kate Perubbins. I'm the Chief Data and Insights Officer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and I'm also an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Engineering there. And I recently joined the Microsoft Regional Directorate Program which is really fascinating. Yeah, congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, it's a really great community. I had no idea it even existed like as early as last year. Yeah, it is. Well, it's and that's in, I guess, partly intentional. I mean, as you know, you've seen some of the discussion where we're trying to kind of elevate the profile of the RDS, but it's kind of a it's a it's a Microsoft being selfish, wanting to take really smart people and and then pick their brains for Microsoft internal purposes. But you know, obviously, and we're doing that, of course, but there's I think there's a lot of other it's a community that's not been fully tapped into by, you know, outside community. So I'm happy to see that Microsoft is doing more promotion of the of the group. So there's I think, I think there's more than 200 now. I'm not sure what the current count is. I just got renewed. So this is my second two year stint through. Congratulations. And when I joined, thank you, when I joined, there were 177. And I think there's like 220 now. I'm not sure. And there were no women RDS in Australia. So we've got I think three or four now. It's really good doing it. It's been a great expansion. I've seen I've got a couple of good friends that just joined as well. So it's it's great to see. And we're all experts in multiple areas. So so you talked a little bit about your expert. Well, your current roles now, what are kind of your the diverse backgrounds? What are your areas of focus? So my focus areas are data and cybersecurity data because that's my job. I'm responsible for all the data across the university and managing it as an asset, making sure it's safe. So data security is actually in my job description. So so cybersecurity is is on my mind a lot. So I've done done some studies. I'm doing some postgraduate studies in cybersecurity to get my head in the space. But I've realized that that is the fundamental thing. If you're going to do stuff with data, especially in the cloud, you've got to you've got to know your security. Well, there's a, you know, yeah, I think it's funny. So my part of my background is in data warehousing. So I worked for the phone company in California for a number of years and kind of found my way into knowledge management and collaboration technology focused on project portfolio management with all of those systems, all those enterprise applications have in common is that they generate massive amounts of data. And most people are oblivious to they'd say, Hey, I really want to see this data on our two and a half million users in this region. And but I'd really like to see it with the geographic information. I'd like to have demographic and psychographic information. So deeper profiles about purchasing patterns, kind of all those things. Can you just go pull that for me? Can you pull like build a report or build a data mark back in the days and be like, yeah, it's a little more involved than than that. Although it's it's gotten a lot better. Yeah, I was on my first data warehousing project last century. That's how old I am. It was at a major insurance company. And I was one of the metadata modelers for the for the back end and, you know, modeling all the back end systems that were going to be presented in this data warehouse. And it was just a hideous project. It was I ran ran away from data as fast as I could after that project and never wanted to do it again. But it seems like but all of these systems in your role now, I mean, again, it's it's a data management is inside of everything when Microsoft restructured when when Satya came on board as CEO and he talked about being more data driven and all the product teams and they started you saw instantly they were hiring just about every team data data scientists the data analyst and having that kind of function. It really highlighted, you know, the shift in the way that, you know, software is being developed and being data driven in product development. Yeah. And now because you know, we've got AI and machine learning at our fingertips. So having the data in a format that you can use is really important. So that that's been my project for the last two years. So I started we started in January 2019 building an asia data world for us so that we could access all the amazing stuff in their stack. And we've pretty much got it so that we can access all of the data we need now. And we have automated pipelines to bring data in. So with a really small team where we've managed to be really agile. And now we can give people insights because it's all about the insights the data is irrelevant on its own it's just inert. It's only when you bring it to life as meaningful information that it's useful to anyone. So that that's what we're trying to do and we're trying to build as much valuable insight for as many people across the organization as possible. So we're trying to deal with big slabs of the organization instead of meeting one person's unique special needs. We're trying to meet as many people's needs as possible. So what are some of the ways that the university is using the data. I mean I'm I have some ideas if I were in the education sector how I might look at that. But do you have like low level down to your professors to you know you're looking at your trending data for their students or is it done at a higher level across a college or a focus area. Well we're doing all of the above. So we've got it we've got the we've got the data at the most granular level so we can roll it up however we want. So that was one of the fundamental things we bring it into a raw data lake in an Azure raw data lake. And then we apply the business logic and business transformations using Databricks and then we put it into a SQL an Azure SQL data warehouse and into an Azure curated data lake because we actually realize that the data scientists don't really want raw data. Everyone thinks they want raw data. So I'll give you an example. So when you when you apply to study at our college at our university you you make an application and then we look at it and we go oh we'll give you an offer and some people get an offer and they can get straight in and some people get a conditional offer. So we'll give you an offer but only if you show us your English scores or we will give you an offer if you finish your current degree this year. So you've got all these conditional offers and they there's all these different codes for conditional offers and they all roll up into the nice category in our curated data lake of conditional offers. Now if you look in the raw data lake you've got to know what those codes mean. So if you're a data scientist who's looking at the raw data you've got to go what's this code mean what's that code whereas you actually need it neatly categorized so that you can just go oh there's all the conditional offers. So that was a real lesson for us that that data scientists actually need some level of curation of the data and that's that was an important function for my team to to perform. Well you know it's funny so I've been through a couple of the so we had a partner organization here in the Salt Lake area that is a big a dynamic consultancy and they were doing a Power BI training course and a lot of people when they look at it what you can do with Power BI even even some of the cool stuff the new features with Excel that tap into some of the AI capabilities and it's really kind of a you know a front door into you're moving you over into Power BI but they see these beautiful visualizations these dashboards that are built and they're just like oh just you pull data together and I'll just build these quick dashboards. There are a few steps behind the scenes to make it look that good you know and it but it speaks to the same issue it's it's you need to have somebody that understands the data there's a lot of massaging or normalization of that data to get it into the right format to feed that definitions data and information governance is so important and it's a hobby course of mine so because a big part of my job is is data and information governance and getting the business definition so that you don't have like a board or a council meeting where two people come up and go oh here's my report and it defines you know new students as this and this other person defines it as that and then they all have a fight about the data you just it's not productive anyway we've had a couple of those incidents that that was what led to my job being created six years ago they had a number of incidents like that where they had big fights in council meetings instead of actually getting on with business so we we've we managed business glossaries and definitions and what we do with our our reporting is we put all the definitions on the final page so everybody understands that when we're talking about new students we define it this way and we count it this way so you can get the same numbers and what we do is all those great capabilities with Power BI and just a really fascinating thing we've not done any formal training in it we just use the Microsoft guided online learning for for how to use Power BI and that's what we tell people is like literally do not go and pay for training just go do that you will learn everything you need to know it's really amazing but we tell them go and pull your CSVs together and use them to create your Power BI's prototypes and then bring them to us when you're happy with them bring them to us we'll automate them for you so that's the thing that we offer so we know we went from being the Power BI we the equivalent of Power BI report writers and we've shifted my team to be more the data engineers who build the automated pipelines and people build their own Power BI's and then we automate them once they're they're happy with them and that's what proved to be a really good model and it's it's democratized the access to the data and it's us fulfilling a role that's more valuating in the organization because if you're just the report writers for an organizer we've got sixty sixty five thousand students around about four or five thousand staff with all we did in my small team was disappoint people when we were the report writers because we couldn't keep up with demand so we had to change the game and that was part of the data strategy that I did in late 2018 where we made the decision to jump to asia from our legacy platform and we decided to shift my team to being data engineers so that that's been really successful is the rest of the university are they also on the microsoft stack are they using microsoft 365 are they using are you know kind of all the other tools as well yeah we were really lucky um our it business our IT business unit has undergone some turmoil so we've had um five five or six leaders in five or six years in our it function um and in one of the early ones they had a project to roll out office 365 it was about four three three four or five years ago I can't remember it was a long time ago and they had this project and they they closed it down they defunded the project so the project team just looked at it turned all of office 365 on and walked away and so the whole uni were looking at it and going oh what's this what's this oh what's this team's thing oh what's this oh look we've got this pal b i thing and we bought an we bought an a five license which is like an e five license for academics yeah so we've got everything and and it just turned it on and left us with it which funny enough is how a lot of organizations you know they they do exactly that they just like yeah it was it was more complex in the older days where there's you know you had additional or or you know all kind of these add-ons of these you know these additional server solutions that were add-on they would turn everything on and uh which creates a you're just a governance mess um well it has but the thing is it's out there now and you can't pull it back so it's sort of stuck with it and um other universities in australia are going how did you get all of that turned on i was just like it was just luck they just i don't know why they did it it was but it was really good and that was an important part of my thinking for azure is the data platform because i was having lunch with a girlfriend of mine agnes penosian who's been at microsoft forever as many microsoft people are and i was like i i've got to get off my legacy data platform and she and i don't know and i've done this aws proof of concept and the business lover she's like we've got an amazing data stack and i said well i didn't i haven't heard about it why don't i know about it and she she arranged some workshops for you and i was like oh my god this is really great so we we did our due diligence and we we decided that that was the way we were going so it's been really successful so we're too using to the project and everybody's happy with us so we're quite happy with us that's great well it's i was thinking too um about uh how university might start you know adopting the technology i was thinking about how you know every monday i've got it now a weekly uh synopsis the my analytics you know presenting with providing me with it do you do anything like that for uh for the the the you know educators were there for their their programs for their classes where they're getting kind of a weekly rolling hey here's performance here's other data here's insights into what's happening with your students yeah yeah and we're sort of consolidating going to planning to consolidate that into my data world so what what's happened over the last few years is many people have done different things on different platforms and now new leadership will come in and go why are they doing that over there and you're doing that let's move them into that world because my my value proposition is i will manage the secure bubble the secure as your bubble and i'll look after security and i'll look after all of the plumbing bits for you and you can we'll build the pipelines to automate your data and then you can build your power BI's on the front end and or and or other things like we have a business unit that wants excel and we used to email them we used to run an excel file extract it from the data warehouse and email it to them every monday and we stopped emailing it and my boss was like where's that file gone and i was like it's it's in the app and she's like what do you mean i was like the excel file is in the app it's automatically connected to the data warehouse it's updated whenever you want it to be and she's like oh my god that's amazing and we had told her about it she just hadn't paid attention to it until she was looking for her email for the numbers so people we were able to help people with their own ability to play with the data but we can automate the connection so my goal is to make all of the downloading of csvs and munging of csvs into excel spreadsheets go away that's my mission in life yeah i mean interesting to know like from a from a like you know inside the university like from a community standpoint um how are you communicating out kind of the latest greatest i mean how are you are people kind of self-driven they're coming with questions do you have kind of a way that you're communicating out here's what's going on and we've got a really normal bell curve of people there's the people who are not interested at all to the really keen people and a whole bunch in the middle um so we use a multi-layered strategy so we've got uh so i've established a power bi user group um and we've got that we've got newbies because there's a whole lot of people who are just just discovering things like that and then we've got a whole lot of power users so we're and now we've got a central team where they can have conversations amongst themselves uh which is really great um we have a university email newsletter we publish stuff in there um regularly so that people because we we actually i don't read it but everybody else yeah yeah just write it i push people to it but i never touch the stuff yeah and but people do you know it's like people do read shopping brochures that get put in your letterbox like there are a group of people who read those things i don't you know i'm not one of the i'm not a newsletter reader um but but yeah so we put in that and then i actually do tours so i have somebody who schedules me through the year to go and visit different faculties and different divisions and go to their meet monthly meetings and talk about what we're doing and what's coming um we've got a website that talks about what we're doing in the data space and data governance website um and then i send regular emails out to leadership and ask them to cascade it down um so we have a multi-channel marketing strategy because uh you've got to keep talking about it until you're sick of it um excuse me if you're if you're not sick of hearing it you haven't communicated enough that's the bar okay yeah that's the bar yeah well there's definitely some topics that i am sick of talking about yeah yeah you're probably only just starting to cut through that's right well we always just said you know it's it's funny doing a lot of community events over the year the last 12 years uh almost 12 years um and uh you see of course you know new releases new features come out and and a lot of the mbps and rds are excited to go and present on start talking about all the new stuff and then you forget that the people that are showing up to these events that are dialing into these webinars they want a lot of that one-on-one content a lot of that core content you might be sick of it but there's still huge audiences as as more and more new people are coming on and adopting a lot of these technologies and they need kind of that that baseline of content still that so they're you you have to i think uh you constantly you know check in to find out you know or have people really moved on to those advanced topics or how much of this baseline content do we still need to provide yeah and only yesterday one of one of my colleagues was complaining because i made him go to a cyber security course and he said oh it was it was too easy for me and i said i said it was so so that you could see the quality of the training for your people and his people found it really really interesting but it was all the really basic stuff like you know use a complex password use a password manager use your antivirus make sure that's on use a firewall you know all of that one-on-one stuff which he's and i was like yeah you're too sophisticated for it yeah it's okay to be too sophisticated for it hey speaking of cyber security i'd be interested to know if there are like what are the differences i'm sure there are some differences with you know being an industry versus within you know education because my my thought is that well you know a cio for a large corporation that maybe has 50 to 100 000 employees but most of those employees if not all of them have signed an nda they're behind that that firewall their their purpose is to you know in theory drive value for the business when you're talking about 60 70 000 students and the faculty that support them those students aren't thinking hey is what i'm doing is the handling of this data this third-party data is this compliant is this secure uh so i i imagine that you run into a lot of headaches that a lot of organizations don't have to experience to the to the same degrees what are some of the differences between security issues you know you have you have hit on a real issue for us and it's it's kind of the different mission so in an inner corporation you're trying to set keep your secrets uh you know you trade secrets and not share them with people um in the university it's all about openness and connectedness and when i arrived at the university about eight years ago we had three full class b ranges publicly addressable with no firewalls and i walked in and i was like oh my god that changed um we got hacked in 2012 before it was cool and they got in through our domain controllers and um we suddenly and back in those days i was in it and um we did the whole thing you know set up firewalls probably got a chief information security officer all of all of those sensible things and we were really lucky that we got hacked so early uh because it was a huge wake-up call to everybody um and now several other universities were hacked uh only recently and they go hack through their domain controllers too so the same way we got hacked and if they read our stuff they would have known to harden those um so there was that so that we had zero security function in 2012 when we got hacked um and now we have quite a solid one so that's that's a big step forward for an institution that just didn't think it needed to be secure and didn't think it needed to harden its perimeters and i think the interesting thing now is is that organizations have changed even for a bank you can't lock everything behind the firewall now you've got to you've got to realize the perimeter is now your people and your their identity and authentication um not your firewalls so that's kind of changed the game anyway but our mission is to communicate with other organizations that are doing research so business and other universities um so we're a very open kind of organization and that's got its own set of problems so and that's where data and information governance come in and it works hand in glove with cyber security it's like the size so and i joined at the hip because you need to work out what data needs to be protected and how to protect it and what data doesn't so much need to be protected so we've got i used to work in the engineering faculty and i was wandering around talking to our researchers and just to find out how much data i was dealing with and what kinds and when i had to stop counting when we got to exabytes because i couldn't do the math in my head anymore so there was a huge amount of data so we've got you know we've got satellites on our roof in one building that just take data feeds of um for for disaster mapping um we've got climate science we've got um some petroleum engineers in one building who go and take petroleum core samples and run them through a ct scanner and then do a whole lot of um algorithmic analysis of them they generate something like six terabytes a day for every run that they do wow you know so there's all of that and then we've also got a hospital so we've got clinical trials data we've got patient data we've got students who are doctors in training who deal with patients so you know we've got all of the things that you could possibly imagine to secure and many different levels so we take data classification really really seriously and um and we have a special process for researchers that takes account of their special needs and we have separate processes for the administration and learning and teaching but the reason data and information governance is so important for cyber security is because cyber security is like a big black hole you can just stand there throwing money in as long as you want yeah and you have said scarce amounts of cyber dollars and you've got to work out how to spend them and data and information governance helps you do that and that's why it's important and and when i realized that because when i got this job i was like i will google this job and there was literally nothing because this job was brand new like there was no way i could have been trained for this job because when i left high school because it didn't exist right and that's why i tell everyone not to worry about the kids the kids their jobs don't exist yet their jobs will exist in the future just give them good educations that's how it always answered these people that say like all the jobs that we're going to lose to ai and capils out there's like it's like no it's it's going to open up so many new opportunities things that is like well what what jobs what are they going to do it's like we don't even know yet i mean it's interesting that you see a lot of the forecasting of you know future job growth and i think two or three different lists that i've seen the number one job is data scientist in every category i have one of my kids he's at the university of utah here he's in his major is atmospheric atmospheric sciences uh at one point he wanted to go work for nasa and kind of in that kind of that side of things and i said you know nick you really should look at um a like a data science like a computer science minor and start looking at some of these courses and when he looked into it he said you know really the people that move forward in this program and work towards getting their doctorate it's not until grad school when they really start getting into these into this area it's it's required as part of the masters and and phd programs i said think how far ahead of all of your peers you will be if you go and have a minor where you're focusing specifically on this i said and the fact that i think through me you can get access to all of these free tools all of the training courses all this stuff like go look into it so he he added it on he's one of those smart kids though he you know straight a uh complaining about all his advanced math classes are too easy you know that kind of stuff but you know uh just you hate those people but uh uh he uh but he's he's data sciences now his his minor and he's getting excited about this i i said you know you're you're likely going to you do a couple years of classes you're going to go and be able to find part-time jobs that again none of your peers are going to be qualified to go and do you'll be able to go and and start in early on i think it's just and it's a great thing to have you know to travel the world when when we can all leave home that is right but you know if you if you've got these sort of skills you can you can work anywhere and that's that's really great you must be really you sound really proud of him yeah i am very very proud i you know four kids two of them are stem kids doing very well on that and two of them are business ones and i tell them i said you know they're they're i said you're gonna find a lot of opportunity too but you know it's uh it's uh i mean as you know in in business and in marketing when you've got that that focus again it's transferable across you know multiple industries um but uh there that you have to um well i guess i was going to say that you have to kind of keep keep up on the latest trends i think that's true in just about every profession out there now where you i literally just did a talk the other day to the Australian um data marketing association um about about how data underpins everything that they're doing and i showed them the the gartner hype cycle for digital marketing 2019 and i said everything on that page is underpinned by data if you don't have your data sorted and you don't know what it is and you're not doing you don't have data integration and you haven't got meta data management and all of this stuff you can't do any of those things on that diagram and you need to get if data is is is underpinning everything in digital transformation now and uh i don't think many people have joined the dots and realize that if they don't get their data under control and secure they're not going to be ready for the new world and covid has driven that that change exponentially because in january i had some colleagues in computer science who were telling me oh my course is special and unique and it can never go online february i came back from my vacation in at the end of february and it was all online three weeks later they were online yeah um i mean the reality is there are certain things like i my my son's a lot of his science classes you know they the labs like how are you doing the labs he's like yeah it's it's less than ideal we're watching videos and there's we there's nothing that we can do to follow along we just have to watch you know double the number of videos and lectures around that uh and so he can't wait to to get back into in the class and so fall it's about to it's going to start here to another couple weeks and uh it's the most of it will be it'll be hybrid most of it be online but those labs they've got it broken up to have you know just a handful of students that are available in the facilities but knowing that like they have to physically be there and have access to equipment yeah and that's been the real problem for us too so we're bringing people back in um in for tutorials and labs only um all the lectures are online so we're keeping the hybrid model too um and and and you know if you could if you're a civil engineering you crash in concrete you actually need to crash on concrete to get an idea of what happens right so the you know labs are a really important part of education and um virtual we've got some virtual medical labs though so we used to have um you know where they would all get a slide and they'd look at it under a microscope and then they'd all have a slightly different slide and then they'd all not see the same thing so they've developed some virtual labs where everybody gets to see the same thing if you're looking through a microscope you can just as easily look on a screen yeah to detect things so but now we have the challenge that they need to use a microscope before they graduate so they do have to do it eventually even though they they can do a whole lot of labs while they're studying um they still do need to learn how to use a microscope because they will have to do it when they when they graduate uh so that's that's kind of an interesting thing where you got some stuff that you can digitize and some stuff that just has to be real life yeah well it's uh well i think that's with a lot of the the you know the student experience it's it's just an unfortunate side of that too is that a lot of the uh look you need to do you need to have programs that cater to different learning styles um some people like myself included i did much better through high school uh where i really excelled is where i was you know independent study go read something write reports interact with my professors uh my the teachers and but more of a one-on-one or small group project type stuff when i was sitting i just my my i just couldn't stay awake in a lecture and then go and take a test that's not my my style where some people i like my wife and a couple of my kids they like they love the lectures and they remember all this data for i don't know how they do it they remember all this stuff and go in and take these these massive these long tests and do very well and then you'll struggle with the uh with the written with the papers and that that side of it um you got to have the different styles i imagine one of the challenges especially for your role is that when you think of like uh you know 65 000 students when that was all predominantly classroom study probably didn't have the level of impact on the systems that you have now with everybody online very little happening in person has that we were so lucky we went office 365 for everybody the students and staff so we were already there so when everybody went home all we needed to do was increase our capacity a bit and we were fine we i was talking to the as your team and they were saying there were universities coming and saying we need to get online to office 365 this week please and i'm like oh my god i don't want to be you know everyone's suddenly gone home no one knows how to use it and we'd already been through that years ago so we were really lucky um and we're using um teams a fair bit we were already using teams a fair bit for teaching and one of our um senior lecturers in engineering david kept dr david kellaman who i work with really closely uh has been doing some really pioneering stuff about teaching using teams and he's used he's actually thrown away his textbook he teaches um first year students mainly so first year sort of solid mechanics sort of courses so he's in mechanical and manufacturing engineering and he's literally thrown away the textbook because he realized that um a textbook was an equity issue text engineering textbooks are quite expensive so not everyone buys them and he's actually they build the course as they go through the term and um he uses teams and he was already using teams before covid so his teaching hasn't been impacted at all um so he would have students you know he would have things like autistic students who found the classroom too distracting who would sit outside the classroom but participate through teams and you know so they they were able to just go home and be fine with it um and my colleagues who were saying oh my course is special and unique and can never go online they were behind the able because they're not used to using this technology so they had to learn it on the fly and it wasn't ideal for anybody so i think i think covid has really driven exponential like covid is an exponential problem you know you see all the charts but it's also driven digital transformation exponentially across many organizations and i i said at my talk yesterday um if your organization isn't digital now it will die yeah well that and there's i think a couple things that you said there i've heard uh you that a number of businesses that have had a similar experience where they were already using office 365 they were already starting to use teams so the shift was relatively easy of course there's always some things that you have to figure out to do we're just we're you know it's not just a collection of of data and coordination of of content you know this is now the way that we're working but some businesses have come out and said that you know uh who who previously said maybe even didn't have uh uh you know cross the board work from home policies in place who said you know what we're gonna stay this way that we find that people are happier that they could be more productive uh the data shows that people work longer hours because like in my basement office i i don't know when the sun has gone down you know sometimes you prompted it like three or four in the afternoon my wife said have you eaten lunch yet oh i should do that i look at it as a win when i taken a shower but before 1 p.m you know i know i've had to i've had to develop some boundaries because it is too easy to lose all your boundaries so now i wake up and i go upstairs i have a shower i put my work clothes on and come back downstairs and then when i finish i take upstairs and do the opposite thing um because i needed some boundaries uh between work and non-work otherwise yeah it gets pretty blurry uh but but i i practice because my team work using azure DevOps and i can see their productivity and their productivity has gone up and i suspect it's because they're not all going out for coffee yeah and stuff so we've actually had to institute virtual coffees because you can't always be working and doing the transactional stuff you've still got to have the social environment because that is the relationships right so we've had to build that in sort of more formally uh because they used to they'd have their stand-up in the morning and then they'll all go out and get coffee and that was an important bonding thing and so i think that's we need to find new ways of working that build that sort of thing in but i can tell you my team's productivity has gone up since kyle well it's it's a uh i i've been working remotely um for some companies that i worked for we got so i left microsoft in 2009 and 10 months later the little company in seattle that i worked for got acquired by the company in boston so i was on the road a lot but you know working from home for the last decade uh and so it was an easy enough adjustment that the hard part for me is that you know where i would break up my day or my week i'm a movie guy and so i'd love to take a break you know midweek and go in the middle of the day go catch a movie and that's been all shut down this is like they're slowly opening that that stuff back up um or go meet with somebody and have lunch so a lot of my mental breaks it's kind of like those those coffee going out and getting coffee in the month like that just stopped and that's where i've recognized even somebody who's working from home permanently you know i recognize that different and it's been that difference has been difficult to get get past that well it's winter it's winter here in australia and uh last month i decided to go down to the snow and um and i went cross-country skiing and then uh the next the next day they discovered covid down there so i had to self-isolate for 14 days and i was like i'm not going i'm not leaving the house again we're so where do you go so we're skiing for for you so i've i've been to a number of of regions down there but um uh so it's south knee canberra in um the snowy mountains so i went to perisher valley okay it's not a lot of snow it's a lot uta kind of snow yeah yeah well normally this time of year i'm going to new zealand which has great snow yes it does and yeah but we can't get out of the country at the moment yeah that's sorry this hey there's beautiful spaces you're in a beautiful area so i i'm sad that i so i i generally am down in australia and new zealand uh at least every other year if not on an annual basis at least one trip to both countries and so when you come back next time please please let look me up and i'll take you somewhere nice for lunch oh definitely yeah well i can't wait to get back there it's uh yeah in fact uh did i hear this correctly that they're i thought i heard somebody say that they're trying to remove all the bats from that park in sydney is that what's the the botanical gardens down there with all the bats in the trees they routinely try to do that the bats come back yeah yeah this is crazy what are you gonna do um and that's an important pollination source like we want bats we need bats yeah most people don't know that if you've not been down to sydney um yeah if you go down by the opera house and the botanical gardens i think whatever the you know that the park that's adjacent to there and you can't miss them in the middle of the day they they are everywhere in the trees but it's uh it's a site but uh yeah you see things flying in the evening it's not a bird it's a bat it's a beautiful area well kate it's really great uh meeting you and catching up and learning about some of what you're doing and uh you know so folks that want to get in touch with you learn more about you what are the best ways that they can reach out to you uh i'm at k carothers on twitter k c a double r uth er s and uh k carothers dot com excellent we'll provide the links of course and everybody can get to find out more information about kate and hopefully one of these days when we start having in person uh mvp and rd summits again i'll see you uh on on campus and redmond i miss travel i i was supposed to be in chicago last month yeah i was supposed to be new zealand this month i yeah i had uh i had uh i had uh i had five european trips cancelled this year really really sad about that and uh yeah but you know they are first world problems so you know i i just hope that you can stay safe and well and i look forward to meeting you in real life in the not too distant future who too well thanks a lot for your time today thank you