 I think Purdue Engineering prepared me for my career by teaching me a lot about using processes to solve problems. You would learn an approach to solve a thermodynamics problem as homework, and you would take that information that they gave you in the homework assignment, break it down, figure out what you needed to solve the problem, and then take what you had learned to apply to what you had just broken down, document what you had done, pay attention to the details, and crank out a solution. I use that in all aspects of my life. I think I knew I wanted to be involved in engineering. When I was in high school, I started to get really interested in science and math when I was in high school. I liked technical problems in being able to solve them. I liked understanding why things happened, and so that kind of curiosity led me to want to study a program like engineering where I knew that I could figure out how to solve problems that affected a lot of people and to learn an approach that would help me do that. When I was at Purdue in studying engineering, I had one professor in particular who influenced me and kind of steered me into the career that I ended up with. This was Dr. Robert Jaco. He was in the civil engineering program. He was just very enthusiastic about air quality, and it wasn't just the scientific part of air quality that Dr. Jaco was enthusiastic about. He was also enthusiastic about laws and public policy around air quality, and that struck a chord with me. I really enjoyed that, and it was part of the decision-making process that I used to go on to study law and get a law degree and have a career that was involved in air quality, engineering, and law. I really had a great experience as a summer intern for the Evansville, Indiana Environmental Protection Agency. It was a small government agency that just gave me a lot of work to do, and I enjoyed being able to see all of the different aspects of how that agency got to work and learned quite a bit from the people I worked with, and this laid a foundation for the career I ended up having as an air quality professional. At the time I was at Purdue, I think there was a really great sense of community within the residence halls, and so I got involved in the student leadership for the residence halls. I was the president of one section of the residence hall that I lived in. I served on the entire governor's board for residence halls, and one of the things I'm still most proud about in my life was when I was the president of Wiley Southeast Hall, we won the Intramural Hall Sports Championship, and it wasn't because we were great athletes or anything like that, it's because I knocked on every door in Wiley Southeast and made people play ping pong and volleyball, and we got more participation points than anybody, and so we won the overall title because we had so many kids participating, and I still have people today tell me about how that's their most vivid memory of me at Purdue is knocking on doors and making people play stuff that they weren't really sure they wanted to do. I have two things that I like to tell young people when they're considering a career. One is to take calculated risk. Don't be afraid to take chances, but do your homework and plan, understand what the issues are going to be if you fail and what's going to happen if you succeed. You only, you don't hit any shots that you don't take, so you got to take calculated risk. The other advice I'd have is be proud of being a boiler maker. It's been a wonderful thing for me and my family to be involved in Purdue, and I think too often Purdue people sort of downplay, maybe it's their science and engineering modesty that comes through, but Purdue is a fabulous university and you got to be proud of having attended here.