 My name is David Brandt. I'm a political science major from Underhill, Vermont. I also have minors in Spanish and English. I remember meeting with my high school guidance counselor and she told me, are you considering UVM? Obviously, you know, you don't have to, but I think, you know, it's something that may be interested in. And I said, yeah, yeah, totally. I went on applying and she asked me, well, have you taken a tour? And I said, I mean, you know, I don't, I don't think I really have to. And then she said, you know, you should, you should really take a tour. That tour was huge. I got to really see UVM. And the school that I had always just considered the school in my backyard, the, you know, the one that I knew everything about, turned into, you know, this whole, whole new place. The liberal arts environment and specifically the College of Arts and Sciences, which is one of the seven undergraduate colleges here and is the liberal arts college here, is what has, what kind of cinched my decision. The fact that I have a liberal arts experience within the scope of a larger mid-range research university. And it is also what has kept me so engaged here. I have had a first-class experience with faculty, small class sizes. I think I've taken 20 courses here by now around there. And all but two of them have been, you know, under 35 students. So I've had been really privileged to have an outstanding small tight-knit liberal arts experience. When you come here as a first year, you move in about three days before the rest, you know, sophomores, juniors, seniors do. And in that time, you get the chance to go to a whole bunch of very cool presentations and you get to go to an activities fair. So at the activities fair, the booth that really caught my eye was the student government booth. I knew I was interested in politics and government. So I figured I'd, you know, pay them a visit. And I was very intimidated by the way, the, what you have to do to get elected as a first-year senator. I found out that you get an election petition and you have to get a hundred signatures before you even put on the ballot. And then from that point on, you know, you have to run a small campaign and you have to convince enough people from, you know, your first year class to vote for you. And in a class of 2,500, these were all very intimidating things for me. I came from relatively, you know, small kind of medium-sized Vermont High School. So I kind of saw that hundred signature sign-up sheet and, you know, shied away a little bit. But a few friends of mine convinced me to take it out. And I went all through my residence hall and knocked on every single door. And people are so supportive and they're, you know, they're so, everyone at UVM is so excited about what, you know, everyone else is doing. So, you know, everyone signed my petition. I got on the ballot. And in my second week at UVM as a first year, I was on the Student Government Association Senate. I was on the Academic Affairs Committee. And today I'm actually the chair of the Academic Affairs Committee. A big concern for me and a lot of my classmates coming out of Mount Mansfield Union High School, which is where I went to school, was that if you go to UVM, you're just gonna run into all the same people you did in high school. And, you know, I liked most of the people I went to high school with, but, you know, you don't necessarily want to be living on the same hall as them. My first year, I lived in a suite of five people. And all five people were from different states, from all around New England. One of my roommates was from Minnesota. One of my roommates was from Pennsylvania. One of my best friends is from Norway. So UVM truly is both local and global. You know, you'll have the excellent experience to meet and reconnect with plenty of Vermonters, but you're also gonna meet people from all over the region, all over the country, and all of the world. To some extent, after that really amazing tour that I had at UVM and after that really amazing experience, I was kind of set UVM as my bar. And I looked at a lot of other schools, really, really great schools, but I kept on comparing it back to it. I was like, well, do I like this more than UVM? And I had a really hard time finding a place that I liked more than UVM and finding a place that had more positive for moving energy than UVM.