 Whoever you are, whatever your background, our colleges meet you where you are in life and help you get where you want to go. All are welcome to learn at our colleges. Now our students, just like us, come with our own unique experiences of advantages and disadvantages. That's what makes our students so special. What makes each of us so special. I find it helpful to think of intersectionality as a kind of lens. The lens that gives detail to the lived experiences of people from different places and with different perspectives. And that reveals how they encounter the world. For example, too many people in Nicolay's district, as in rural regions everywhere, face other significant if less pernicious inequities. Every day we are reminded that education deserts are real and they're mostly rural. That internet connectivity and cellular dead zones are widespread in rural regions. And if you can get service, it costs more. Rural youth of all races and ethnicities go to college at lower rates than their urban and suburban peers. And it's not because they're less well prepared. As a result, our district is home to many working adults without college credentials. Perhaps yours is too. And it's not that they don't believe in the value of education they do. It's not that they don't want to enroll. They can't. The good news is that we invented our policies and practices in another time and for a different population of students. And we can reinvent them to work better for today's bar disparate student body. But the obligation to change is ours, not theirs. I really, really applaud our efforts in education to try to do something similar where we're really collaborating on behalf of that individual person, that student, and meeting the various needs from the different angles, from the different perspectives, as opposed to the compartmentalized services that we often provide. You know, we're not necessarily structured or staffed in ways that makes this easy. It makes it really very challenging. But I think it's worth that effort to get greater outcomes for our individual students. These students come to us not only with the experiences that perhaps you and I have, but very different experiences, experiences about how they manage their disability, experiences that how are they coping with and adapting to the experiences that they had as a veteran or as a minority person or a person of color. We oftentimes don't understand their perspective and it's because we frankly never had the opportunity to experience what they have experienced. And so we need to be thinking about the whole individual. This will modify the way in which we teach. It modifies the learning opportunities we give them. It modifies the support services that we give them, whether it be food or housing or helping them deal with depression or some other factor that is getting in the way of education. One thing we know for sure, if they can attain that credential or degree, can attain that goal that they have set for themselves, they will be much more likely to lead a successful and happy life.