 I'm Claire Stubbins from Miami-Sburg, Ohio, and this is my honors experience. I came to the University of Alabama in specifically the Honors College because I felt that I was invested in. If it wasn't for the Honors College, I wouldn't have had all the opportunities that I've had. I've had the opportunity to travel to Cuba to live in Perry County in the Black Belt region of Alabama for a month, teaching a literacy curriculum, fortunate enough to run all of the K-12 mentoring programs that operate in the city and county schools. When you're working with anywhere from kindergarteners to high schoolers, their stories are so diverse and they're so diverse in their interests and their passions. I love to hear about their families, where they come from, their struggles, the things that really bring them joy and light up. And so the community engagement experience to me is getting to engage the students and bring that back to the university and to my peers and be like, hey, this is what's going on in our community. Come be a part of our community. Come be a part of what we're doing. And so the engagement to me is going and meeting these, going and working with the community so that these students, they have the opportunity to see, these are the real lives of the people and the community that you live in. You're calling home for four years. How can we serve them in the ways that they're expressing? I can't even put into words how much joy it brings me to work with those students. The Honors College has fostered my passion continually and it's taken it from like a little spark and exploded it in the best way possible. When you're surrounded by people who are like-minded as you are that are driven, that's inspiring to be around people like that all the time and I don't think I would have gotten that experience anywhere else.