 Hi everyone. I hope you're enjoying your virtual open house. Thanks for joining. My name is Kate Regev and I'm the current vice president of Preservation Alumni. I'm also currently an assistant adjunct faculty member and I was a graduate of the dual degree program in which I completed both the historic preservation program alongside with the architecture program at GSAP. So I'm going to speak to you a little bit about Preservation Alumni which is one of the most important organizations to the program and is really a great opportunity for students and alumni to get together. So I'm going to move over to that. You may be asking yourself so what is Preservation Alumni? We're a nonprofit organization devoted to the friends and the alumni of the historic preservation program at Columbia. We were founded in 1977 and since then we've worked hard to support and enrich the program by advising and assisting students, faculty, alumni and beyond. We really try to advance the idea of preservation as a diverse field that's both meeting at the public and private sectors and we do this really through professional development. So we try to aim to support both the program which would include students and faculty and then our members who are consisting typically of a mixture of alumni and friends of the program. For students specifically we have a few different awards and programs that really help students navigate their way through the program and beyond and so one of those critical things that we started in the past few years was a mentorship program which strategically pairs students with professionals in the field who typically are matched based on mutual interests and professional and career interests. The Fitch Prize is awarded to a student who has completed an outstanding paper or project and then we have both conference grants and a thesis grant that supports thesis work and travel. For those who are no longer students or for those who are just kind of more broadly a member you know again there's the mentorship program which allows people to connect back to the program and also out to others in the professional realm and then we also have the Platchek Fund which works to purchase select items for Avery Library with the goal of making these items both accessible in the library and then also accessible to the public once they're scanned and available digitally. And then finally for our alumni we have an annual leadership award that's given to one of our illustrious alumni for their leadership in the field. On top of all those things we also really value getting together physically and so we organize a whole host of members only tours to various historic sites around the city. Typically those are projects that our alumni are working on or have worked on and so it's always really nice to be able to tour with a space with someone who has kind of insight or knowledge about that area or that particular building. We also have a speed networking event as well as spring and fall parties which are when we present various awards and kind of broad updates to our community and then finally we always try and give back one of the great things about preservation is that it touches everyone and so we always like to organize a few volunteer days a year in which we can go out into our communities and give back. And so last I just want to end you know we recently started created a new website so we would love for you to come and check out our website. If you have any questions you can always send us an email at info at preservation alumni org and then finally you know we hope to meet you all in the fall and if you have any questions we'd love to hear them. Thanks.