 I am Brandon Sells, a PhD student in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. I am a black engineer. In the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics representation is tough. There's not too many of us walking around in the school at the faculty level or the staff level. It would be great to see that representation in that ranks as well as the graduates to the undergraduates are there but they're far in view. We'd like to see more. It means everything. It's my identity being able to be a part of putting together technologies that can improve people's lives and yes you can do that as an engineer but as a black engineer I feel that you bring a perspective that it's holistic in how people can involve themselves with the technology and we're not just looking at technologies for people that can afford it. In a lot of projects we have these technology feasibility studies where we say if this could happen what's necessary and we find that there's a lot of capital that needs to be made but also we understand that for the people that want to use this technology it needs to be more widespread and I feel that being able to use that basis to develop technology is important and I feel that stems from being able to have different people in the room and so with my research projects they have different backgrounds, different ethnicities in the room and yes that experience is great and academically speaking Purdue does a great job in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. I have everything I need but that representation piece is what keeps me up at night. There's not too many of us walking around, there's not too many of us in the classroom and that's something that I think Purdue Engineering and the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics could do better. I think that if they want to truly represent the society that we're trying to improve then I think there needs to be more people that look like the minority in the room. When it comes to using my voice I'm able to put myself in different rooms. I have access to different committees that I've served on where I have interactions with administration, department heads and that's great. I'm able to use that as a tool to bring perspective to people that don't have that perspective. Not saying that it's easy work because again I'm a graduate student, I'm a PhD student so that's my first focus but diversity, inclusion and equity is something that I'm brought to do and my voice will continue to be heard. I just want to make sure that the spaces that I'm in I'm respected there.