 Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes? All right. Well, yeah, thank you for having me. As Carol mentioned, in a few months, it will be our 10-year reunion from graduating. Yeah. Okay. So soon we'll have our 10-year reunion. So this is my first time back on campus in a while. And I was just reminded of the initial tour I took when I came to Fairfield. And I remember the tour guide in a really awkward moment, asking us to look around the group and then telling us the stat that a certain percentage of alumni at Fairfield end up getting married by the time they graduate. Do you guys remember this stat? Well, I didn't marry an alumnus from Fairfield. However, I think by the end of this discussion, you'll realize that I think my decision and my major here at Fairfield did lead me to my future wife. So we'll get there at the end. I came to Fairfield very much interested in being a history major. History was always what I think I did very well and what I liked doing the research, the archival work, the essay writing. But what I liked to read about and what I liked to research was Italian history, culture, you name it. So the double major in history, Italian, turned out to be a blessing. I didn't intend to be a double major. In fact, I thought I would place out of Italian when I came here because I took Italian in high school. And I'm so happy that I didn't because it brought me into this room now. But also, as you'll see, it really did shape my future. The year abroad was key for me. I went abroad as a junior. I did my first semester in Syracusa and my second semester in Florence. Syracusa really immersed me in Italian, particularly southern Italian culture. And then Florence really taught me how to really work the libraries and work the research aspect of my studies here at Fairfield. So it was very different going from Syracusa to Florence, but one that ended up being very rewarding, particularly when I graduated because I was looking at history PhD programs. But I was also contacted by Fairfield, which encouraged me to apply for a Fulbright grant to go to Italy to study. And I don't know whether or not any of you are interested in the Fulbright program, but Fairfield is excellent in not only encouraging you to apply, but walking you through the whole application process. One very key component of the application process is that you need to show somehow your competence in the language of the country that you plan to study. So had I not been a major in Italian here, that would have pretty much destroyed my application because the dialect that my grandparents spoke was not going to get me entirely for that. So like I said, during that year as a Fulbrighter, I really learned how to work the archival bureaucracy that you might encounter if you go this route. But I also learned to teach. I spent a few hours a week teaching at an Italian high school. And that's when I started to question whether or not I wanted to be a full-time scholar or a scholar teacher or just a teacher. I ended up applying to grad school, I ended up at SUNY Binghamton where I worked with a wonderful Italian historian, a historian of Venice in particular. And he even said it when I applied that he was excited to take me in simply because of my Italian competence. Because so many students who do go this route go to grad school, spend the first few years just learning the language of the country that they plan to study. And that can probably talk to Carol more about this, but the idea of not knowing the language when you enter into a PhD program could be detrimental. So that was wonderful. Within the first year of grad school, I realized that as much as I liked the research, I did like the teaching aspect a lot. So I knew that I also had an apartment that was empty in the West Village waiting for me because my mom had moved. So that also was a bit of a reason to think about going back to New York, but I didn't know what I would do other than teach. I am a graduate of a Jesuit high school. That's also a reason I came to Fairfield. So I looked at Jesuit schools in the Tri-State area, and there's a Jesuit school in Jersey City called St. Peter's Prep that had an opening for a history teacher and an English teacher. And it was both. You could not apply to do one or the other. You had to do both. And so I figured I just might as well apply and I might as well go into the interview. At the interview, I didn't spend much time talking about my non-English qualification. I hardly talked about my history qualification. The headmaster, the principal at the school, was a foreign language teacher himself. He taught German. And he just wanted to talk to me about Dr. Goldfield here at Fairfield. They were acquaintances, not so much friends, but he knew him. He knew him well. And just we spoke about the Rossias Goldfield method and being a TA here. And I got the job. And I didn't really, he didn't even watch my demo lesson, which was for an English class. So the history class was fine. I knew what I was doing. Just to explain, if I imagine some of you were planning on going in the field of teaching. So for the English class, I was teaching seniors. And it was my first year teaching, high school seniors. And they had four options for English. You could have done AP English. You could have done honors English. They could have done elective English. And then there was English four. And English four was for the guys who didn't choose anything. That's the class that I was given, English four. The least motivated. The bonus, what was excellent for me was that there was no set book list. The department chair just said I could choose, I think it was 10 texts, or nine, nine. And the only real literature classes I had ever taken were the ones at Fairfield. They were just Italian literature. So that became the syllabus for these kids. I started with bocaccio because teenage boys, they loved it. They ended up recreating cycles of detention based on Dante's cycles of the inferno. When it was a nice day, I took them out to the quad and they read each other, petrarchan sonnets. At one point, a student questioned my qualification for being an English teacher. He said it's just what you learned as a student in Italian. I said yes. I think that kid actually went to Fairfield. I know he applied. And I liked that class so much more than I did the history class. It was lovely. It was great. I ended up leaving St. Peter's Prep for my alma mater Xavier High School, which is in the city a bit closer to home. And now I teach AP European history to seniors where again the first part of the curriculum is all renaissance Italy, early modern Italy, which is great. I'm active in the Italian club there. I help the Italian teachers on trips to Italy or other great cultural venues in New York. I'm working on an Italian exchange with students from the school in Calabria where I did work. And in the faculty lounge, I realized very quickly that the coolest, most cultured, hippest teachers in the building were the foreign language teachers. And that's where I noticed Colleen and we're getting married in May.