 I grew up in Athens, Alabama and I really enjoyed studying mathematics and so when I wanted to go to college I looked around at a bunch of different colleges and I really fell in love with the University of Alabama and I came here to study applied math and it was just the best decision I could have made. Alabama started me on the platform of what I wanted to study and I just built on it from there and eventually went from computer science and then into business, got an MBA and now I work at Google where I do a lot of the technical plus business aspects of the partnerships that Google Cloud puts in place. What you get at a place like University of Alabama and especially here is you get the whole college experience, you get foundational academics, but yet you also get to experience college, you get to meet so many different other people, you obviously have a lot of spirit on campus and it really you come away from that with a camaraderie that I carry every day you know I'm proud to tell people that I'm the University of Alabama alum and I wear the you know the Alabama wear in California you know it's something that you really feel part of something for your whole life. So when I was at Alabama as you might guess I studied a lot I was one of those people that was studying kind of all the time but I did have a very close friend my roommate who was not studying all the time and so we would go do great things and we were great it was I helped her study and she helped me go to places that weren't about studying so we had a really great experience it was one of the best times in my life. When I was at the University I had a mentor Dr. Kathy Randall in the computer-based honors program and I'm happy to say that she is still my mentor I see her every time I come back to the University because she's always given me such great advice and and great insights into how to look at being a whole person and not just focus on one thing and leave other things you know unattended and so she's always been such a role model for me and I really appreciated the mentorship then and as it's continued my whole life and career. I remember sometimes walking across the quad and just you know really being appreciative of just how beautiful it was and how special it was I felt like that time was really so fleeting and so fast at that I and I sort of knew it at the time and when I left I went to graduate school at Caltech in California and I wound up doing my whole career in California and so when I come back to the University it really means so much to me to walk on those same steps and really kind of have that same feeling because it's very much coming full circle. So I made it to Google by going to Caltech for graduate school and as I left Caltech with a PhD in computer science I helped found a company and eventually became the CEO of it and then about three years after I became CEO Google acquired most of the company and so I wound up being acquired into Google with a team and really joined Google at a time about six years ago where we could really have some really foundational impact on the way Google builds its infrastructure and since that time I've moved over to the cloud division where I help run all of our partnerships with technology partners. I come from a family of blue collar workers my father was an electrical maintenance worker for TVA. It was very rewarding this last spring to be able to go to Bridgeport, Alabama to help the groundbreaking for Google's newest data center in Alabama and it was really meaningful for my family because my father actually worked at that plant before I was born and so it was really a very full circle thing from you know his blue collar coal plant background you know all the way to a green data center as part of Google's global fleet. What Alabama did for me was prepared me for a future that I couldn't see yet. There was no job that I have now that industry did not exist in any form there was no giant internet company there was no internet to speak of. I think if you learn that way and you'd be able to follow the vector of what your interests are and where you see that you can have impact you can really do some amazing things that are just not visible to you yet. It's important to me to participate in this kind of program because I think it does help people at earlier in their careers people in Alabama see a path that they might not have known exists you know a path from you know from Alabama to Caltech to Google and that's not something you want to hide you want to show people that that this is this is a path that others can follow and that they need to work hard and take the opportunities that they can but everything is possible here.