 Well thank you Dean. I'm really looking forward to getting into the conversation portion of this and the questions from students because I understand a part of this was not to have me talking at you but to really have a bit more of a discussion about some of the issues that are going on and some of the things that would benefit the most from people like all of you pursuing paths in public service. You had asked first of for me to say just a little bit about 9-11 and my own path to public service and although my career in government started before 9-11 for me and for a lot of people I'm not sure those are entirely distinct topics. I sometimes look back on my time as a line prosecutor I used to say baby prosecutor on the front lines in Atlanta in the 90s working with other lawyers state and local police FBI special agents putting away corrupt public officials and dangerous via criminals and just about everything in between and what motivated me then and makes me and made me feel like I had the best job in the whole world was the cases the purity of advancing justice and a fighting for victims and their families. I think for example about a case I had about 25 years ago involving a single mom of a seven-year-old little boy the guy that we were prosecuting had targeted her for a hit to prevent her from testifying and as if that weren't enough his plot included hiding her body and parking her car in long-term parking at the airport so that everybody including her seven-year-old little boy would think that motherhood had just been too much for her and she just abandoned him and I remember the afternoon in that courtroom in Atlanta when we put the guy away for the rest of his life and that woman the mom who couldn't have been more than about a hundred pounds was sort of shuttling back and forth between each of us on the team hugging us and sort of shuddering as she was hugging us and she kept saying the same thing to each one of us over and over again she kept saying thank you thank you for saving my life and in that moment it kind of hit me you know light bulb went on that there's a seven-year-old boy who's gonna grow up with his mom instead of being a permanently scarred orphan for the rest of his life and we the team the agents and I we did that and now that may have been a result that didn't matter to anybody in the world outside of that courtroom but it absolutely changed the life of that mom and that little boy in the most really fundamental way possible and whatever else I do in my career I will never ever forget that moment or any number of other moments like that in these kinds of jobs so then fast-forward 2001 summer of 2001 my family and I moved to DC and over the next several years as the Dean alluded to I served in various leadership roles in the Justice Department including overseeing the Justice Department's criminal division which at the time included national security programs especially counterterrorism and on the morning of September 11th 2001 I was a fairly new appointee still getting the lay of the land when I heard that something was happening up in New York now I'm a born and raised New Yorker so seeing the first images of smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center was not just shocking but personal to say the very least you know my mom for example worked just a couple blocks away and I remember racing across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Justice Department and spending most of the day in a jam-packed command center at FBI headquarters with the Attorney General and then FBI Director Mueller and everybody there was trying to help while at the same time struggling to comprehend the horrific reality of what was unfolding and we didn't initially know who was attacking us or or if more attacks were coming we all just urgently wanted to do something I also remember in the months that followed working to understand how 19 terrorists had been inside the United States plotting a complicated synchronized attack and yet government agencies we hadn't discovered their plans or been able to stop them so in taking this job 16 years later I've sort of vividly remember the urgency that we all felt in that packed FBI Command Center on 9 11 and the urgency that we all felt for months every time there was a plane that was non responsive to air traffic control the urgency that rippled through all of us every time somebody got an envelope with white powder in it and we'd all be thinking oh oh is it is this it is it happening again but more importantly more importantly I remembered how that urgency translated into unity and action into a fierce determination to work tirelessly to prevent something like that from ever happening again and I decided that I wanted to come back in service to help the Bureau continue on that path I was sworn in as FBI director in August of 2017 just before the 16th anniversary of 9 11 and one of the first things I did as director in 2017 was to meet with the 9 11 Memorial and Museum staff up in New York where I'd been asked to give a speech and so we talked and they offered to give me a tour and so I asked my wife and my my grown daughter who had just started a new job in New York to come with me on the tour and if any of you haven't had the opportunity to visit that Memorial Museum I strongly encourage you to find a way to make the trip because it is a deeply moving experience outside there are two sunken fountains in the footprint of where the buildings had once stood inside the exhibit goes down under the fountains where the original building foundations were and all along the tour are artifacts from that day images of the victims and audio recordings from witnesses you can see things like the structural beams where each plane impacted the buildings the emergency vehicles crushed when the building collapsed the seawall that barely held the East River from flooding the subway system you can hear the stories of those who barely escaped those who could not and those who ran into the buildings to save the lives of those who were trapped another aspect the 9-11 Memorial Museum highlights very well I think is all the victims you know it it's easy sometimes to get lost in the scale of what happened that day you can go to the memorial and look out at the empty space where those two gigantic buildings used to be you can stare at the massive list of name after name almost 3,000 people lost their lives that day a number of which by the way has actually since been exceeded by those who lost their lives to 9-11 related cancer from all the work they did responding to that scene and that's a number by the way that just keeps rising so it can be easy to kind of get overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the loss and so one of the things I think the music knows importantly especially well is that it has a space carved out with individual tributes to each person lost that day so you can stop and recognize one person somebody like Josh Rosenthal and you can learn a little bit about each person's impact so when I went through this tour as the new FBI director I I did something a little bit different which I was watching my daughter really closely my daughter's about the same age as most of you she's in graduate school herself and she'd been alive in 2001 but she was probably like six so young enough in one sense to remember it but not really to understand and really appreciate what had happened and and it struck me as we were going through the tour watching her experience the museum that day that every time we turned a corner for example when we crossed a damaged staircase that had been an evacuation route where people had dodged you know falling debris you could see that she was having kind of a aha moment I could see her expression change a couple times I could see it a little bit of moisture forming you know in the corner of her eye you know subtle but the sort of tell-tale signs that only a parent can recognize and I could see her for the first time really experiencing the gravity of that day especially for somebody who as I said wasn't totally aware of really what had happened back in 2001 I saw it become so much more real for her and so I took my experience watching her experience back with me to my office at the FBI and I thought about you know we have three generations of FBI employees who were live on 9-11 we've got those who like me remember what they were doing at the FBI on 9-11 we've got those who were so moved by what happened on 9-11 that they joined the FBI and then we've got those like my daughter that age who were only kids on 9-11 those for whom they really only know the terrorist attacks as sort of a historical anecdote now that was in 2017 now today in 2022 we have FBI employees who weren't even born on 9-11 and I say all that because I think there's a really important difference between intellectually understanding something and viscerally experiencing it it's one thing to know about all the ways in which the FBI changed after 9-11 but it's a completely different thing to feel the consequences of our work what's at stake another memory that has stayed with me all these years has to do with an experience I had about two years after 9-11 when I was the assistant attorney general and I took part in a presentation to families of the victims lost in the attacks and as the day rolled on I kind of moved to the back of the room watching the line prosecutors and case agents update the family members sharing what we had learned up to that point about each of the four flights in kind of a detailed minute by minute way and the grief in that room was palpable I mean you could feel the weight of it it was almost overwhelming and I remember for example the father of one young woman who had died on one of the planes and he stood up because we had an opportunity for people to ask questions he stood up to ask a question but he only got about four or five words into his question before suddenly abruptly his knees kind of buckled and he just kind of collapsed to the floor was lying on the floor kind of you know sobbing and that's remember that's two years after the attacks I remember another man who lost his wife on one of the flights and as I recall he was a police officer who was working a night shift and so he had just gotten home at the time of the attacks and had gone to sleep and like so many of the victims his wife who was a flight attendant on one of the flights called from the plane as it was going down to say a tearful goodbye but because he'd gone to sleep he didn't pick up so she left the message but she tried again you know maybe a minute or so later and this time you know he had kind of emerged from his fog and so he answered the phone and so they they got to talk and they had a chance to say their goodbyes as you know gut wrenching and heartbreaking as that must have been and so her husband then spent the next several days staying with other family attending to her funeral making other arrangements and he returned home several days later as he goes into his house to check his new messages and the first message is that call from his wife and he hears her voice and try to imagine what that must have been like the the sort of skip in your heart as you hear your spouse's voice thinking you would never going to hear that again only to immediately give way but to the you know the overpowering pain of loss so that kind of knee-buckling in the case of the one guy literally knee-buckling grief that those two men experience and remember there were thousands of them that sense of having something that's most precious to you taken away ripped away from you like that that that doesn't go away it dissipates with time but it never it never goes away and after you experience not just in here but in here that kind of grief that that heaviness after you feel it in your bones even as a prosecutor or investigator much less as a victim or a victim family member it changes you forever and the 9-11 attacks profoundly changed not only our country but they changed the FBI very specifically today's FBI reflects those changes in every FBI program not just counterterrorism every investigation every community we serve and they continue to impact and share and shape the FBI as we seek to combat new and emerging threats and and adversaries of 20 years later it's vitally important that our agents and analysts not only remember 9-11 as a historical moment but also understand and feel the urgency of that moment one that continues to reverberate in how we carry out our day-to-day jobs because those experiences and that urgency should change you it should give you a deeper understanding of just how much is on the line in this work how much crime and terrorism wound victims and families and what a awesome responsibility we have so as director I started asking myself how can I replicate what I and my peers remember about those days and years following 9-11 and what my daughter experienced walking the halls of the 9-11 Memorial Museum how can I replicate that for our new FBI agents and analysts and so I had the FBI's training division work with the 9-11 Memorial Museum to set up an onsite class that would be a small part of every new agent or analyst training and now every class of new special agent and every new class of intelligence analysts tours the Memorial Museum and takes a class with the staff up there because I believe there is no better way for them to grasp the importance of the work we do both how we approach that work and the stakes of that work than visiting that hallowed ground in lower Manhattan we want new agents and analysts to come away from that visit understanding why we're so focused on integrating intelligence into everything we do why we emphasize partnerships why it's so crucial that we tackle every task with rigor and urgency why we've got to be willing to adapt and innovate to meet constantly emerging new threats so we have now more than 3,000 trainees have now experienced the Memorial and I'm proud to say that thousands more will have that opportunity in the years to come and having our agents and analysts make that visit viscerally reinforces for them why they applied to the FBI in the first place and we hope they come away from that understanding that they didn't pick some ordinary job they've chosen to do something extraordinary and millions literally millions of people that they'll never know are counting on them to do that job well to make sure they do the work right I have one final thought before we turn to our conversation you know talking about public service that gives me a chance to mention another way that the FBI recreated itself after 9-11 something that led to completely new public service opportunities within the Bureau each of the people who lost their lives on 9-11 had their own stories and the 9-11 Memorial Museum as I said does a powerful job of telling them all of the victims family's friends co-workers suddenly had gaping holes in their lives and as agencies were overwhelmed in trying to help the FBI turned to woman and Catherine Terman who was a sociologist with the Justice Department who had worked as a victim witness advocate and Catherine grew and built the FBI's victim services division from a handful of well-intentioned staff into a world-renowned core of more than 300 specially trained professionals we even have two crisis response canines Wally and Geo and other than the fact that they leave a lot of hair all over my suit I can attest that they are both wonderful at what they do and we now have victim specialists in each of our 56 field offices all over the country to help people harmed by crime they provide on-scene assistance they triage needs they refer victims to counseling employment housing immigration medical or legal services they go with FBI special agents for things like interviews or death notifications and they coordinate as liaisons with other government agencies and external partners and the work they do with children is particularly outstanding and regardless of what else is going on in our world these are FBI professionals who are ready to drop everything to help in their communities or to quickly fly elsewhere to set up shop you know their work doesn't always get as much attention as our FBI special agents but for instance just two weeks ago at the same time that our agents were arriving in Colorado Springs to investigate the absolutely tragic and intolerable shooting at Club Q our victim specialists were there to establishing a family assistance center to provide services and assistance for those affected and the families of those killed it is heartbreaking really to see events like that play out over and over again as they have this year but I'm proud of the work that everyone involved in that case in Colorado and all of these kinds of cases has been doing they truly make a positive difference in people's lives so I guess if I had to choose one thing to ask you to take away from today is that public service doesn't have to be aimed at affecting dozens or even millions of people to be meaningful when I think about that mom and her son in Atlanta in the 90s I recognize how all of us involved in investigating and prosecuting that case changed her life and her son's life for the better and again while that trial generated a certain amount of news coverage I'm not sure anybody outside that courtroom really grasped what had happened but it definitely meant something to her and it continues to mean something to me today even thinking about 9-11 as the guy overseeing the case against Zacharias Masawi who was sometimes called the 20th hijacker I remember how important it was to our whole team there to make a point of treating treating each and every one of the 2,977 victims that day as individuals individuals who had been murdered and whose families shouldn't be cheated of the grief and loss they were all feeling just because of the sheer number of people killed on that day so commitment to the pursuit of justice for every American that for as long as it takes and that's the kind of work that the FBI's 38,000 men and women are doing really every day in communities all over this country and overseas all over the world so if helping others interests you I hope you'll consider a career at the FBI but more than that I hope you'll consider public service in whatever avenue you find in whatever capacity your life allows I think I'm proof that a career can navigate both private practice and public service and I will tell you having done both during those times of my life when I've been able to devote myself to public service I've been fortunate blessed really to feel the immense fulfillment that comes from the opportunity to serve others and my own community and I can promise you that you too will find immeasurable value in serving others so thank you and I'm looking forward to our conversation