 Good afternoon. Oh, you can do better than that. Good afternoon. I'm glad to welcome you here and to welcome your son's and daughter's here. Much earlier this morning I was walking around and you did one and you did two and you did three. Seeing people move in with those great orange bins, standing large, lovely, terribly tall. I want to thank you for trusting your son's and your daughter's to us. I know what extraordinary thing that is when you're a parent because I've sent my own children on to college now so 20 years ago, so a long time ago. And I'm living proof that you survived the experience. How many of you, for how many of you is this the first child who's into college? Oh, quite a few. How many of you, for how many of you is this the second child who's into college? Proof that you survived. For how many is it the third child who's into college? Fourth? Fifth? It is just all of us, for all of us that live in higher education, this time of year is the most exciting time of year because you're surrounded by so many beginnings. And these years, for a traditional aged students between 18 and 22, we certainly have lots of older children. It's just such an extraordinary time because they're trying to figure out who they are going to be as grown-ups. And it's going to mean for you, as I remember very well from my own experience, that the kind of relationship between closeness and distance is going to change for you and in your relationship with yours. It's part of everything you want for them to see the happy and successful adults. I thought I'd say a little bit about this is a new beginning for me too. I started as Chancellor of Joy first, although this is a campus which I have many decades of experience and much on the street. But I just wanted to say a little bit about the goals that I have as Chancellor. First within this building community this is a I often have said that different colleges are like different kinds of communities. I was at Smith College as its president for 11 years. Smith College was like a small town. Everyone pretty new, much new, everybody else. There wasn't more than one degree of separation between one person and another. Really there are more degrees of separation. It's like a city and it really responds to city skills. So some of the most important things that you can do for your son and daughter are to encourage them to find their neighborhoods to find their academic neighborhood to find their extra curricular neighborhood and to find their living neighborhood. This is a place where you have to knock on doors that unlike smaller places that this responds to Berkeley responds to initiative. People are very eager to help but they don't often come up to you and say, can I do this for you? So you can encourage your son and daughter to knock on doors to ask questions to if they don't understand something or have a question to ask it. There are no stupid questions. So it's really important to make the best of Berkeley to do that. But so one of my first goals when my first goal is building the sense of community on this campus that is so big, so urban, so diverse. The second goal is to enhance the quality of the graduate experience even more than it is now. A big piece of that is increasing our housing capacity. Berkeley doesn't have as much housing as we should have for our students. A third goal is diversity, enhancing diversity and equally important, enhancing the empathy that is an important piece of diversity. A fifth is making the conditions as good as they can be for our faculty members' research. There is not a planet, there is not a problem on the face of the planet or important to human climate. We don't have faculty working on it and we want to get out of their way and make their research as productive as possible. This includes lots of opportunities for students. So your son should really insist seek out experiences where they can work with faculty on the survey and then finally I'll be developing a new financial model. Berkeley is such an exciting place when I came here now many decades ago. I fell in love with the campus. I fell in love first with the people who were your sons and daughters all that many decades ago as students. They're extraordinary. They're diverse. Everyone has a different story about how he or she came to Berkeley. Then I fell in love with the faculty. There is not a subject on the face of the earth that a faculty member not only doesn't know about but isn't extending our knowledge of. And then Berkeley is a place where history is happening. You get the sense of being just extraordinary things are happening. You're a part of that history when you're here. It's a kind of powerful excitement. And with a story from my time at Smith we used to have a gathering at the end of this day a moving day in which all of the new students not 9,500 new students but about 600 new students came in our and we started to worry them in campus to tell them that their parents and any other family members that were there. And each of the leaders of the administration gave a little speech. I gave a little speech. The provost gave a little speech. We always had different speech by the dean of the college. Dean of students. And she said you've done an extraordinary amount for all daughters to get your daughters to this moment. You've fed them, you've clothed them, you've nurtured them, you've loved them. You've helped them through all of the challenges and trials and victories out there of their time up to this moment when you arrived at Smith. And now there is one more thing that you need to do in order to assure that your son or daughter has a successful beginning to her college experience. Go home. I know it's really hard because I've been there to, you know, I've all the parents of tears were coming back to my you know, my memory of all those years that I've lived through this day but it will be an extraordinary experience and if you don't care for your son or your daughter certainly my experience is it means that things are okay. So thank you very much for entrusting your sons and your daughters to us. I hope they have a fabulous first semester. My email is ccryst at Berkeley.edu. I answer all my email. I read all my email and if there are burning issues that you want to ask me about I'd be happy to have tried to speak to you. So thank you very much.