 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Michael Donnelly Boylan and I am the Assistant Dean for Admissions here at the Law School. I would like to welcome all of you to Roger Williams University School of Law and to Orientation 2018. I am so excited to see this class. You have no idea. I welcome the class of 2021. We've been anxiously waiting for you. Today officially kicks off the Law School's 25th anniversary. We in the Admissions Office have had the distinct pleasure of getting to know you over the last year. Thank you for sharing your stories with us. The class of 2021 has a wide range of experiences and I'm here to tell you a little bit about the folks that you will be calling your classmates for the next three years before I hand your class over to President Workman, Danielle Noski, and the faculty. Students in your class attended a wide variety of colleges and universities all around the country including Fordham, Stonehill, BYU, University of Arizona, and Boston College. But some schools sent us more than others. Four schools are tied for sixth place on the list of largest feeder schools to your class. Those schools are the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Connecticut Stores, the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, and Salve Regina University. All of these schools had three students attending. Johnson and Wales is in fifth place with four students. The John Jay College of Criminal Justice City University of New York is tied for third place alongside Rhode Island College, each with seven students in the class. Our own Roger Williams University is in second place with ten students. And this year, not surprisingly, the top feeder school to your class is the University of Rhode Island with 21 students enrolling, 12% of your class. In your class you will find a nurse, a physical therapist, an EMT, a professional dog trainer, an immigration paralegal, and an actress who has appeared on TV shows like Blackish and the Mentalist. Your classmates have had many interesting internships. In the room tonight we have an extradition intern from the Rhode Island Attorney General's Office, an international law intern from the American Red Cross, a social work intern with the New York City Community Court, a legislative intern with the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission, an insurance intern from Ernst & Young, and a compliance intern with Smith & Wesson. Your class has an unusually large number of students who have spent time on the front lines advocating for social justice. You have helped the victims of sex trafficking in Philadelphia, mentored unaccompanied minor immigrants in Rhode Island, worked with the medical legal collaboratives of Massachusetts, and worked with prisoners re-entering society in Alaska. You have been in the Teach for America program in Memphis, the Peace Corps in Zambia, and numerous AmeriCorps programs. A classmate assisted our veterans in the Spokane Washington VA Hospital, while another served as an advocate for rape victims in Alabama. Your class has canvassed for the Human Rights Campaign, served on the board of the Latino Policy Institute, and protested the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. Another unique trait of your class is deep political involvement. You have interned for a number of United States Senators and members of Congress. On both sides of the aisles, including representatives Lee Zeldin of New York, Raul Crihalva of Arizona, and Jim Hines of Connecticut, as well as Senators White House in Reed of Rhode Island, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, and Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona. In your class, you will find the person who chaired the City of Central Falls Charter Commission, the Principal Policy Analyst for the Rhode Island Senate, and someone who ran a campaign in Boulder, Colorado. You have interned for the Democratic Party in Virginia and Vermont, and worked for the Super PAC that supported John Kasich for president. In your class, you will find a former Rhode Island State Senator and a current member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives. At the law school that houses the highly regarded Marina Fairs Institute, it should not be shocking that a number of your classmates have done interesting things on and around the water. Your classmates have been on their school sailing teams. They have also worked as commercial fishermen and as dockhands. One of your classmates created the University of Vermont's first environmentally focused publication, someone interned with the Palo International Coal Reef Center, and another worked with Clean Water Action. Your classmates have researched oyster growth, shark reproduction, and the cardiovascular systems of zebrafish. Five percent of your class served in the United States military, representing the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and National Guard. We thank all of you for your service. Now, some of you were focused on paying for college and making ends meet for the last few years. We celebrate you as well. This class has baristas from Brooklyn, New York, Portland, Oregon, and Ypsilanti, Michigan. I was just like you in college. In fact, one of the ways I paid for college was serving as a barista in South Bend, Indiana. And better yet, my RWU colleague, Deborah Johnson, was the person who trained me on how to make lattes there. True story. Someone else in your class did three years working at McDonald's. I did six years to pay for my schooling and I feel your pain. No matter who you are today, you all enter the law school with a blank slate. We are dying to see the lawyers you will become and how you will change your worlds. Thirty-one percent of your class is made up of Rhode Islanders, meaning more than two-thirds of you are relocating to the Ocean State. Twenty-seven percent of your class hails from the other New England states, and twenty-two percent of you comes from the Northeast. Ten percent of your class is from the South, six percent from the West, and four from the Midwest. Your class has another interesting geographic quirk. You'd expect that Providence would be the city most represented in your class. And it is. However, Providence is tied with New York City. In fact, if you broke New York City up into its parts, Brooklyn itself would rank third. Just behind Cranston. And the Bronx would rank fourth, tied with Rhode Island towns like Newport, Central Falls, Portsmouth, and Cumberland. Daniel Noski, I think there are some Yankees fans in the house tonight. A large number of your classmates are immigrants or refugees from countries like Columbia, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Guinea, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and Venezuela. In fact, over nine percent of your class was born abroad. So it may not surprise you to hear then that there's an unusually large percentage of your class that is coming to law school with the goal of advocating for immigrants. The average age of your class is twenty-five, meaning half of you are younger than this law school for the first time in our history. Sixteen percent of you are over the age of thirty or older. A number of you are married and many of you have children. Nine percent of your class, sorry, ten percent of your class, identifies as members of the LGBTQ community. Both the numbers of students over thirty and our LGBTQ population are near record highs. Fifty-six percent of your class is made up of women. Forty-four percent are men. Your class has the highest percentage of women of any class in this law school's history. In continuing with the trend of historic numbers, thirty-two percent of your class comes from racial and ethnic groups underrepresented in the legal profession. As RWU law enters its twenty-fifth anniversary year, we are extremely proud to say that your class is the most racially and ethnically diverse class in this law school's history. I am also very proud to say that your class has the strongest GPAs of any class in the last six years. I commend all of you on your academic achievements. Finally, I'm very pleased to welcome our Masters of Studies in Law students to RWU. These students, mainly working professionals, will be taking classes alongside our JD students while they earn their MSL degrees. I think you will value the perspective that these new students will bring to the classroom. It has truly been a pleasure getting to know all of you over the last year. Please do not be strangers to the admissions office. Stop in and say hello. As I said to all of you on Facebook last night, the next three years are going to be challenging. When the task seems insurmountable, and it will, I want you to remember we chose you all for a reason. We see your potential, and we are on this journey with you. We know that you can change your world. And on behalf of all of us at RWU Law, welcome to law school.