 Well, I want to welcome everyone to careers in the liberal arts. My name is Ronald Davidson. I am the director of the Humanities Institute here at Fairfield University and the chair of religious studies. This panel is in some part pulled together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the National Endowment for the Humanities, as it was from a 1983 NEH Challenge Grant that the Humanities Institute was born. But the primary impetus is to rectify a distorted narrative in the United States today. Anyone in higher education today has heard this distinctive narrative about the decline of the liberal arts, particularly the humanities. We are told that rewarding and remunerative careers are not possible for liberal arts majors who are condemned to indentured servitude for low paying physicians for the rest of their lives as a result of their choice of majors. Finding your passion in English for the study of religion is, in this storyline, a self-inflicted dead end. Many of us in the liberal arts have had students come to us, sometimes in tears, saying that their parents won't pay for education unless they graduate with a degree in business. It would be foolish not to understand student concerns, even when President Obama expressed on January 30, 2014 that he thought art history was a poor undergraduate major, and then candidate Marco Rubio on November 10 of last year indicated that we need more welders than philosophers. Both were giving voice to a culturally approved meme that was, in fact, false, which Obama later acknowledged and which Rubio did not. We might observe that 6% of the 10% of the wealthy Americans were art history majors. That philosophers out of college make, in fact, much more than welders, both being still underpaid. And that data indicate that liberal arts graduates will make approximately the same lifetime earnings as business graduates. Even more, we might observe that the critical skills of the liberal arts cannot be easily outsourced. However, right now, software startup Ken Show and Goldman Sachs have developed software that may replace financial analysts. And one estimate is that Goldman will employ one-third fewer financial analysts within a decade as a result of this software. By this standard, we may wonder if a business degree does not face its own employment challenges beyond the narrative given. In distinction, many of the jobs that you will engage in the next 10 to 20 years have yet to exist. And of the ones that are still present, a 2013 paper out of Oxford suggests that, quote, occupations that involve complex perception and manipulation of tasks, creative intelligence tasks, and social intelligence tasks are unlikely to be substituted by computer capital over the next decade or two. It is these soft critical skills that are the focus of the liberal arts and provide an advantage in human capital as our panelists themselves can attest. There are stories and their careers also affirm that the ideas of one going through a straight path through life is less true than is often assumed. Now, I would like to introduce the panelists whose longer bios are available for you to read. Ashley Allen here in the bow tie is the only bow tie, is president of 247 Wall Street. He was a religious studies and philosophy double major. He went into sales and then law and then ended up starting one of the more important business news sites in the country. Jen D. Simone, raise your hand, Jen, is talent acquisition recruiter, corporate finance at NBC Universal. Jen is a psychology major and worked previously in corporate recruiting. James Martin, James, would you hold your hand up there, is deputy editor ESPN. A politics major, he won the award for distinguished research in the humanities when he was here, was accepted into the best graduate programs in American politics for a PhD, but decided to go into a career in sports journalism instead. Matt Ryder, that's right here next to me is senior consultant, IBM digital operations. Matt was a double major in Chinese studies and philosophy. After his full bright in China, he went on to a master's degree from Tufts and again from Harvard. Lauren Short down there next to the last is vice president of corporate marketing and national director of retail marketing for First Republic Bank. She was a double major in art history and psychology and previously worked for Tiffany and Company and Christie's Fine Arts and Events and Marketing. Finally, Stephanie Oliver, newly minted, is a account executive with Indeed. She was a communications major and now communicates with small to medium sized clients in the Northeast and Central US as part of Indeed sales. So I would now like to invite our panelists, beginning right here with Matt, to take a few minutes to discuss how their own stories and the place of the liberal arts in their lives and in their careers beyond Fairfield. Yeah. OK. So I'll tip the hat. I am incredibly impressed by this panel. I just have to say, and I can only hope that my story holds some water amongst theirs. So put simply, I came out of Fairfield with a dual major of Chinese studies and philosophy surrounded by peers with the question of now what and my answer was a one-way plane ticket to China. From there, I improved my language skills. I applied and got a Fulbright research fellowship. I then turned that into research and further development work that then put me in New York working in politics and leading larger scale development projects in New York under the Gates Foundation. From there, it brought me to Harvard and Tufts, where I did dual masters. And ultimately found me in a place where I really employ each of these phases or spaces in my previous life, each of these kind of sprints, if you think of it, again and again now in business strategy consulting. So as I arrive at a new client, as I see the opportunities ahead of me, I'm right back with Professor Davidson. I'm right back on the road in China. I'm once again in a school in New York. And I'm thinking about a laundry list of opportunities, of whatever risks we're approaching, and what the best solution might be. In each of these times or spaces, I kind of knew that this in the end would have to come from me and that I would have to not only own this, but I would have to ultimately see it through to the end. When I developed my own independently designed studies major, I knew that I would have to in every sense justify this along the way, not only at Fairfield, but afterwards. And I think that a lot of those lessons as well as the skills that were developed have, I would say, paid dividends throughout my career, throughout each sprint, but simply. OK. Ashley, would you like to talk about your story and liberal arts? I'd like to start out by apologizing. Some things don't change. Apparently, there is homework. I'm not very good at homework. I never have been. I was supposed to prepare a statement. So if this is muddled, it's entirely Dr. Davidson's fault. Thanks for having me. I had a really terrific education at Fairfield. I had a number of wonderful professors and I benefited from the kind of rich liberal arts tapestry that you guys are now all enjoying. I was naive and didn't do what I thought was good for my career or what might be my career, but rather what I was passionate about. I thought I liked philosophy because I'd studied a lot of classics in high school. And so that was my first major. And then I took a class, an intro to religious studies class with Dr. Davidson. And I realized that a lot of what drew me into philosophy, namely this idea of creating schemas, of kind of relationships between ideas, was borne out in religious studies. And in addition to that, you had these really awesome stories about gods with many arms and many of you have had a class with Dr. Davidson. It gets much richer than that. And so I say that to you to say, I benefited from that education and so far as I was bit by the bug of learning very early. And throughout my career, what has driven me more than anything has been a desire to do things that kind of similarly engage me intellectually. I had the benefit of doing an internship where I was running a small ad sales operation for an online futures news site back when the capital line internet was just becoming a thing. So they gave it to an intern to do. So I had that to fall back on. I didn't have any jobs when I graduated, so I kind of did that. And while it was a sales job initially, I quickly kind of took to the job the same way that Fairfield had kind of taught me to, which is looking at what the job entailed in a greater sense. And that meant understanding how advertising works and how technology works and how the competing business interests are for that particular industry. And that is, I think, a life motif which has carried me throughout my other jobs, which is finding things that you're excited about and then probing them as deeply and passionately as you can has really been a lock and key for me professionally. It has made going to work ceaselessly interesting. It presents challenges because if you're always trying to learn something new, it's very hard to be bored. And I'm speaking vagaries here, so I'll give you nothing concrete. What else can I say? So the current job I'm in, I started out as general manager of a business news site. I was a first employee, which made it very exciting. So I was responsible for printer, toner, and coffee, and making sure computers were working. But I also had other jobs like growing the business and ultimately understanding editorial direction. And in this job, where I find myself now, it is a deeply analytical job. We use a great deal of statistics and mathematics and economics. We've designed a number of internal systems to doing analysis programmatically, which economics lends itself to, econometrics if anyone's taking any economics classes. And I say that because I never knew when I started out as a philosophy religion major or when I was in ad sales or when I was a technology sales guy that I would be doing economic analysis or visualizations or writing programs. And what led me here was a passion to learn, being excited about what I did, and being not smart enough to know that I didn't know what I was doing. So I kept on trying. So thank you. James. Hi, I'm James. I was in some PhD programs after I left Fairfield U. Realized they were all math and got out of that fairly quickly. Went into journalism, had no plans, just started writing for the New York Times, freelancing wherever I could. One lesson I learned was don't think any jobs beneath you. Take whatever you can and do whatever you can because it will lead to better things. I then moved to China as well. Not for academic reasons, I fell in love. So I moved across the world. But there I did work. I got some freelance opportunities. I worked for some newspapers. I did some tourism association stuff. I didn't know the country, but they gave me the job so you take it, right? Came back and was still fairly confused but kept looking around to see what I could do. Got a job at Tennis Magazine, Tennis.com, and then that segwayed into my true passion, which is football, or as most people call it, soccer. And I've been with the ESPN covering football for about seven years now. Just things that I learned that I thought I could impart from my education at Fairfield U. I mean, Fairfield U makes you smart. I mean, that's just the bottom line. And you'll notice that when you're in the workplace. Whether you're dropping philosophy quotes or just anything you want, you're gonna stand apart, trust me. Things come back that you don't even realize you remembered. But the other things you learn, besides the book smarts that I can see now is all the stuff you're not necessarily aware of learning when you're here, which is handling deadlines, pressure, how to prioritize things, how to deal with difficult professors. Not him, by the way. Best professor ever, thank you. But you will encounter all that sort of thing. You'll encounter dealing with groups of people and having to do projects. And you might not necessarily get along with them or agree with their approaches. And you're gonna have to find ways to compromise and find ways through a project. And these are all skills you're not necessarily cognizant of when you're here. But when you get into jobs where you're dealing with people that treat work as sort of a Lord of the Flies with ties, you realize that you need to have those skills. And Fairfield U has given me those skills in spades. And that's probably the only reason I actually have a paycheck these days. So that's what I have to say. Stephanie. Well, as some of you know, I recognize a lot of you out there. I have a very recent graduate. I graduated this past May. I was a communications major with a marketing minor. So my story is not quite as long as everyone's sitting around me, but it's fairly new. And I'm very excited to be in the workplace now. Right now I am working at indeed.com as an account executive in sales. So my story kind of began right here back on campus in one of the career fairs. Started out, had an internship at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, which led to my next internship at Indeed, which led to my full-time position. So I really attribute a lot of my success so far to Fairfield itself. And I have found that working in my position, even though it isn't sales, I am incorporating a lot of my education, whether I realize it or not, on a daily basis. I work mainly with clients in, as Dr. Davidson said, in the Central US and as well as the Northeast. So one thing that I have come to find out is that everybody's different, whether it be in different parts of the US, different parts of the world. And I am pulling a lot of the knowledge and conversations that I've had in classes and even just conversations among friends, kind of recalling on them from past experiences here and finding that organizational communication probably one of the most important things that I ever learned at Fairfield, figuring out how the structure of companies are and how they work and relating to people based off of their specific needs because everybody is different, businesses are different. So I'm very excited to see kind of how Fairfield Education incorporates more into my life. This is just the beginning for me, so I'm very excited to see kind of where I go from here and I know that Fairfield experience is truly going to contribute more and more to my work life moving forward. Jen. Hi everyone, I'm Jen. I graduated in 2008 with a degree in psychology. As some of you may recall, 2008 wasn't exactly the greatest year to graduate and find a job. So at the time, I honestly truly did not know what I wanted to do. I had interned in schools. I thought I wanted to be a guidance counselor and I actually interned at Fairfield Prep. When I graduated, I decided that I think I knew I wanted to move to New York and experience New York life and work in a corporation. So I just started networking and going on interviews and learning about different industries and I ended up taking the first job that I got. I ended up at News Corporation and Ad Sales and I thought it sounded glamorous and exciting and a brand name organization. Little did I know it was the absolute worst job for me. And I think you need to take those steps, first of all. It's really hard to know 100% what you want to do at the beginning of your career but just because you end up somewhere at the beginning that's not right, if anything, it's a learning experience. So that's exactly what it was for me. I, from there, it wasn't the right fit so I ended up taking an assistant job until I could figure out truly what I wanted to do. I networked quite a bit. I met with different people at different organizations. I connected with alumni, whatever I can do just to get in front of people and learn a little bit more. I ended up sitting down with one of my dad's, his HR partner, he works in banking and I sat down with her to learn a little bit more about human resources because I thought that was a direction that I wanted to go. And she said, you know, Jen, I actually started off in HR in recruiting. It was a really good opportunity to get my foot in the door and I learned quite a bit and then from there I transitioned into HR and I said, oh, that sounds interesting. So I interviewed for a couple of different recruiting jobs and I ended up at an agency and I ended up really loving it to my surprise. It was really fast paced. I got exposure to a lot of really big name organizations. I got to be a part of building something at all of these large organizations. I made a lot of relationships and it was just a really exciting environment. I enjoyed the pace of it. From there I felt like I had hit a wall. I felt like there wasn't, when you're working in a small agency there isn't a lot of room to grow into something larger. So I ended up going to the corporate side and ended up in corporate recruiting. At NBC I've been there for three years now. It's been a really great experience and I use my psychology degree every day and I use my liberal arts education every day. You'd be completely surprised the skills that you gain from your education that are transferable into the real world. One, psychology focus. You learn so much about analyzing people's behavior about understanding behavior. Every single day I have to figure out and understand people's skills. Where do they fit in in the organization? Are they the right culture fit for the team, for the company as a whole? Even though I support finance, I lead finance across NBC, every single business that I support is completely different even though they're all finance related positions. So every single day I have to really understand individual personalities, their skills and where they can fit in our company and where they can grow long term. Aside from that, you learn communication skills. You learn writing skills. Every single day I have to talk to CFOs. I have to talk to the global heads of groups. I have to be able to articulate sentences in a way that sounds coherent. So being able to take the writing skills that you use here and bring them into the corporate world is really important. You learn, I think, one of the most important things that I gained from Fairfield. Being in a small school environment, you gain more skills than you can possibly imagine. You get involved in group projects. You have the ability to do that because your class size is so much smaller. You're doing group projects. You're working on teams. Guess what? You do the exact same thing when you're in corporate America. You're broken out into groups. You're learning how to work together with other people. There are gonna be people that are difficult to work with and there are gonna be so many different personalities that you come into when you work in the real world and I think you learn how to deal with those things and that starts here with your education. So I think that's really important. Just basic skills, being able to use Excel and PowerPoint, all of those things you need to use every day. So everything that you're doing here every single day, you will need to use those skills in the real world. So just remember that. You might think as you're sitting in art history class or religion class, when am I ever gonna need to use this again? Everything that you gain in those classes, you eventually build upon in the real world. So I honestly feel like I gained so much from my education here. I feel like I use everything that I learned here on a day-to-day basis and that was with all of my jobs, even until I finally found one that's stuck and that I made a career out of. But in ad sales, I used my skills every single day and even as an assistant as well. So I think that what you're doing here is great and you'll definitely be able to use your skills in the future. Lauren. Hello everyone. So I am Lauren Short. I graduated in 1991. I was also a psychology major and I believe I was the first graduating class of art history majors here. Is that right, Dr. Schwab? Or so, ish. Butters County. Yeah. And let's see. I guess I'm here to tell you that an arts degree at Fairfield translates into the business world. That I think that's my bottom line really that, and nobody's more surprised than me to be totally honest of kind of where I've ended up. I was definitely sort of a purist upon leaving Fairfield U that I wanted to be fully focused in the arts and I moved to New York, went back to, was going to CUNY for my art history master's degree and was working for an art dealer and then I received an offer for a position doing public relations and working for the chairman at Tiffany. So thought that I would gain some skills that would be useful. So moved there. It was a wonderful place to work. I loved luxury marketing. I realized I loved event planning. I loved etiquette, stationary invitations. And if I go back far enough, I plan the prom. This has been in my blood forever, so it made sense. But so also worked in community affairs at Tiffany and they get barraged with requests for community support and helping to wade through that and make sense of that was part of my job and it's something that I've continued to do in all of my positions since. From Tiffany, I moved to Christie's because it was closer to my ultimate dream which was to get back into the arts and I was actually there for 10 years. I ran the events group, helped to build a sponsorship program, a site rental program. I helped to make events a revenue generator instead of just a budget line. It was great fun. I was absolutely living my dreams. I absolutely loved my job. But it was a 24-7 kind of life and tons of travel and there was this little bank that moved into our building and I started advising them on things they could sponsor at Christie's and things that they could do in New York. New York is their first community where they were going to make a mark on the East Coast and they asked me to join them and I thought they were crazy for asking to be totally honest and they really had to convince me that the relationship building skills and the communication skills and the event skills and the network that I built at Christie's was transferable to this sort of fledgling bank. It wasn't fledgling on the West Coast. It was quite developed on the West Coast but we were just starting it up on the East Coast. So anyway, let's just fast forward. That was 12 years ago. I now am the vice president of marketing, corporate marketing for the East Coast and I do the retail marketing for the whole company in our 70 offices and all they can tell you is I love my job. I have so much fun. I get to work on our strategic partnerships and community support. I do a lot of public relations and events and client business building but the thing that I really love the most is relationship building and so strategic partnership building. So I work with Christie's all the time. I work with Lincoln Center. I keep saying I want my own desk there because I'm at Lincoln Center three times a day. The Joyce Theater, the new museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. It kind of goes on and on and these are organizations that either are clients of our bank or where we fund programming there but it is so exciting to be able to make programs happen and I still call Kathy and say is this a good idea? What do you think of this exhibition? Should I be doing this? And I have to tell you, so one of the wonderful things you have here is a network of professors that care about you now and will continue to care about you till the end of time and will remember you and know your face and name and you can be intertwined with them forever and that's really special. I don't honestly know anybody else that has that kind of relationship with their undergrad professors. I live in Southport, Connecticut now and it's funny, I see Dr. Elizoff coming and going and at the pizza place and we've maintained a friendship and a sort of advisory relationship where he helps me with making decisions as well. So I feel really lucky to be doing what I'm doing and what I want you to know is that one thing that I think Fairfield does for you is it helps you develop your sense of what I call practical creativity. Please don't ask me to write us on it. That's not the kind of creativity that I have but I can figure things out. I can be resourceful. I can keep a project on track. I can, for me it's more problem solving skills or connecting dots. A lot of great networking happens here and I think those skills are really honed here. I want people to know that you really build your job. I don't think anyone walks into sort of like the perfectly prefabbed position. I think that you take a job that you think sounds exciting and then you prove yourself and you get given more responsibilities that are in your lane and you sort of discard things that are not so much for you. And eventually you wind up being really sort of defined by your job and jobs defined by is you too. I don't know how to explain that but it really you become sort of a meshed in your role and I guess that's the most important thing I want people to know is that you pick things up along the way and then you ultimately get to the spot where you're meant to be and where you can add the most value. I just wanted to note, so Google hiring the talent group, they call that smart creative. So I think- There's a name for it. Yeah, they have a name, just so you know they have a name for it. So you've hit exactly what they look for as well. I think that's something that Fairfield does for all of us that really do. Do you guys out there in the audience have any questions for our panelists? No, but anyway, how do you think you could transition? What is the transition? How do I approach transitioning to business possibly? I feel like you had an interesting path but in general what advice would you give to people facing that challenge? I think internships are super important. I've hired permanently the last three or four interns that I had. It's obviously a great chance for you to test the waters and see if you like the group and the company but also for the group around you to understand your work ethic. I think it's funny, here I am in this business role and I did not take any business classes undergrad at Fairfield. Nor have I hired anyone with any banking background which is interesting. I keep going back to the Fairfield well and to the Christie's well and the Tiffany one but I find that for what I do, people with luxury marketing that's really transferable or people with great, with non-profit background. One of the women that I hired from Fairfield U went on and got her master's degree in arts administration and now is working with me at the bank and has been for nine years and it's totally transferable skill set so what we do. So I guess what I'm saying is stay close to alumni, get to know alumni, do internships as much as you can. I keep coming back to Fairfield when I hire because I know that it's a community of people where there'll be this sort of automatic recognition somehow that will just be on the same page very quickly. Fairfield people have in my experience a great work ethic when I hire people at the bank, everyone asks me, where did you find your people? They just work so hard and they're not precious. They're really just solid, you know? So that's the word on the street about Fairfield U graduates so you should know that. But I guess think about the specific skills and don't worry too much about where you're going to apply them. Does that make sense? Like my skills would be probably applicable to marketing for any kind of company and your skills I think would be too. I mean there are millions of places where you could apply them so it's about making contacts in different types of companies and taking baby steps I think toward what you really think you want to do. Nick. What are the skills and methods you would demonstrate to the skills I've got in writing, and in analyzing human behavior and that sort of thing? Is it applicable? You keep saying that so how do you convince the person you're trying to get hired for? I really think it's about internships in your first few positions. I think you have to get into a company and show them that you can write and show them that you can communicate. You have to become a person and not a resume. I, does everyone else agree with that? I would also add don't pretend to be something you aren't yet. Make your cover letter extremely short but snappy and smart. The resume should be one page. I remember my first, my first resume was like three pages and I hadn't even gone out of Fairfield U yet and I was like this is mental. So people will look at those things that are hiring. I've hired about 24 people over the last few years and you get about 10 seconds and you need to make that count. Once you get into the interview, make a good impression. I'll just chime in here quickly. As somebody who does this every single day, I hire people every single day at NBC Universal. I think as somebody graduating, well you're still in school, so one thing you want to just really focus on, you don't necessarily need to have a degree in something that you want to do. Something to help you give a little bit of an edge is getting internship experience is really, really helpful. It's obviously very competitive when you graduate. All the graduates are graduating at the same time. Everybody's going for the same positions. There's a couple of things that really helps you stand out. One, you know, trying to get internships in something that you think you might want to do is really helpful. Two, the biggest mistake I see all the time is people don't take their interviews very seriously and they don't put any time or effort into the organization or what they can contribute to the organization and they treat it as just any other interview without doing your research and without actually coming prepared for your interviews. That's your foot in the door and I don't think that you necessarily need to have a specific degree. I think it's how, you know, take the time to put together a really great resume. You want to make sure there's no spelling errors or anything like that. See if you can get internship experience in something that you want to do. I think that initial experience is really helpful to give you an edge if you don't necessarily have a degree in something that you want to do. And also networking as well. You have a huge network of Fairfield alum. I'm sure you have plenty of other avenues as well where you can utilize that to just getting in front of people and having conversations and letting people know what you're interested in. You never know what that can lead to. I think the, being said, in internships is a particular thing that's good and important but also broadened that to just do something cool. Like do something fun, do something interesting, right? I mean, whatever it is that you do that's interesting, right? And then do it, wow, do it, right? Big type of thing. So whether it's, you know, whether maybe even as a student going to China and doing something interesting there like it doesn't have to, you know, whatever it is that you like and just, so people can then see you're just applying whatever it is that you're applying to, whatever it is that you think is, you know, that's cool. And then they're gonna hear it, it'll come through. So internships are a way to do that, right? This is also a part of just get the experience of what does a job like, right? That you're there to do something and produce something for them. And if you spend time in an interview talking about what you're gonna get out of it and you're missing the point of what you're doing and going to work, but it doesn't have to be a job. Like you can just be cool stuff. Like, I mean, if you're a painter, what do you paint, what talk? Like talk to me about, you know, what that's like, where have you visited? Where have you gone? And, you know, these types of things. So I think mostly you want people who are thinkers and interesting and doing things and then have actually done it, like as opposed to a lot of ideas about what they'd like to do and so forth. Like what, like. I would second what Aaron said. So I followed a very different path in that I, you know, just left the country. And it's like, I mean, I just avoided the whole job market after I graduated and, you know, I didn't really work in an office office for eight years, I guess. You know, I really moved around space to space to space. And I found myself in many different organizations, many different places. And I was passionate and committed and excited. And, you know, I didn't know really understand or know what it was like to come into an office every day until I am where I am today. But that said, so now working in consulting, I have many offices and I have many spaces. And to be honest, my work starts early and my work ends very late. And you balance so many things in the career that I'm in now or the space I'm in that I hope to really never know the, you know, that struggle that'll happen, I think to many of us as we begin our career. But that said, I have aspired to pass what they call the LAX test. I don't know if you've heard of this before, but there are some of the big companies out there, especially in the IT world. So they call it or the airport test, right? Call it the JFK test. But basically the idea is that if you're there with the COO or somebody of a similar, you know, Accord or a stature that they could spend six hours with you stuck in an airport and you'd keep their attention and you'd remain interesting. It's a tough test, right? And it's not easy, but it's, you know, you are genuine, you're passionate, you're curious, you're smart and you have committed yourself to something for some reason and you hold values. And I think that, I think that this university cherishes that and certainly helped me build a lot of those kind of assets early. But, you know, so I have to apologize, I'm not as good at the really strategic kind of steps out of college just because I went in a very different direction, but I would say that, you know, no matter what you do, the idea that you remain curious, that you're smart, that you're flexible, and that you have some level of analytic skills as well as passion, which I might have already mentioned. It deserves two times. I think that all of those things are key. Oh, sorry. Just kind of wanted to chime in real quick. You know, one thing that I was worried about the same exact thing, you know, graduating, I'm in communications. So how am I gonna do this? I can talk well, I can speak well to people, but what else? One thing to really remember is that Fairfield always encourage their students to get involved. Do what you can, whether it's a leadership position, whether it's an activity here and there, whatever it is, use that and really hone in on it. You know, whether it's in interviews or, you know, first interaction, networking, whatever it may be, during my interview with Indeed, you know, great, I had sales experience in my past internship, that was great. They wanted to know what I did as an RA. How did I incorporate, you know, the artistic ability that I did with billboards and, you know, programs? How did I incorporate that, and how can I relate that to work today? Because at the end of the day, work is working with people, it's speaking with one another, it's, you know, building projects. It's everything that you've done at Fairfield, and it directly translates to the real world. So keep that in mind too, you can definitely pull your past experiences in leadership positions that you've had from Fairfield and really translate that into, you know, the next step. I think that's really important because I think you may not realize that you're forging relationships now that will influence, I mean, maybe you are realizing this, but I don't think I realized it when I was undergrad, say you're forging relationships now that will influence your career path down the road. And I still call Kathy Schwab when I need to hire somebody because I asked Kathy for her shining star. Who's like the ace of the slide library? Who's pitching in with you in the department? And that's who we give the internship opportunity to. And, you know, watching you doing this in the evening, you're gaining experience, you're using your undergrad to get experience that will help you build your resume, you know, and that's these relationships you're building now really aren't meaningful. But if you haven't had any good internships and you haven't gone to China, and you're there with an otherwise very dull personality, I'm saying effectively what everyone has already said in many different ways, I hire, every single one of the people I hire, I generally hire for one reason, and that's because they're giant unapologetic geeks. And in the interviews, they completely geek out. And that is why I hire them, because they telegraph to me that whatever silly project they did, there was their senior thesis or some paper that they got especially excited about, they telegraph how important it was to them and they will, if they're doing their job, they're going to describe how complicated it was, how unique their perspective was, even it wasn't especially unique. They're gonna do their best to demonstrate that to me. And that is one of the most important things in any interview is just give it 110%, completely geek out, be excited about those silly gotcha questions they ask you. Well, I wanna thank these remarkable panelists that have come to us, our wonderful distinguished alumni, let's all give them a round of applause, please. And thank you all for coming. We will take snippets of this and build various small videos into our website so that those students who do not have the opportunity to come today will have in the future opportunities to see how it is that one can come out with a liberal arts major or two, not go to China or go to China. And at the same time, really excel. And so thank you very much for your participation today. Really. Thank you. Thank you.