 To an undergrad now I would say you know I get it there's a million things you could devote your time to as a Stanford student it feels like people are pulling your limbs in every different direction there's a million interesting opportunities but I would say the Ethics and Society Center and thesis and program will give you so much attention and support it's a small program to write a thesis in they're amazing advisors and you really get the benefit of being able to investigate a question that feels important to you something that feels urgent something that today in the world if you thought I want to answer this one question I want to solve this one problem you can have the help of an advisor and mentors and a whole cohort and work on understanding solutions to that problem. Although most of our students are not philosophy majors students in the program successful students do enjoy thinking philosophically about moral social and political issues. I was joined at the undergraduate honors program my sophomore year when I took justice with Rob Riche it's by far one of my favorite classes I've taken at Stanford and I think at this time I was thinking about majoring in computer science and was hoping for a set of qualitative skills to understand the world around me. I feel like really the most rewarding part of writing the thesis for me was just kind of the really incredible exposure that I got to leaders in the field in so many different ways. I got the chance to talk to philosophers that were engaging in the topic from from this very academic and philosophical standpoint. I got the chance to talk to policymakers that were actually implementing these policies. I got to talk to formerly incarcerated individuals that are kind of living through the experience of being marked by the criminal records that they suffer from and to policymakers that are really trying to make these these really systemic changes so I really got a bird's-eye view of what is happening in this field how I might want to potentially interact with this system further down the line. It was incredibly rewarding to answer a deeply personal question from the this philosophical framework being able to step back from something so I wrote my thesis on vegetarianism and it was something I'd been practicing for years in my life beforehand but then to really engage with it on a philosophical level and ask myself the hard questions you know does this work as a political practice is it you know does it work under a utilitarian framework does it work under a Kantian one and actually trying to challenge my beliefs that was deeply meaningful because I didn't know that in school you could think about these deeply personal questions with advisors and mentors and that that could be something you did academically. I think the spirit of the program can be best characterized as personally meaningful academically rigorous and extremely rewarding.