 Forsyte Technical Community College is pleased to be a national leader in preparing the biotechnology workforce for the future. Recently, Forsyte Tech led a group of 12 community colleges from North Carolina to California to Utah, Texas, Pennsylvania, and throughout the country in pursuing and being granted a grant to work on biotechnology curriculum and making sure we have the skilled workforce for tomorrow in biotechnology. Biotechnology and life science has been one of those areas that has suffered the least decline as much of our economy has been challenged over the last seven or eight years. In North Carolina, biotechnology employs well over 57,000 people. It's nearly a $65 billion industry for the state. So regardless of your career path or your desires or your strengths or weaknesses, you can begin exploring opportunities in this particular area. So today we have probably a thousand folks working in the Innovation Quarter, and their activities are mainly in academia and also in several startup companies. Within a year, we expect there to be almost 3,000 people working in the Innovation Quarter, 45 companies or departments of higher education, including workforce training, we hope, involved in such diverse activities as regenerative medicine, biomechanical engineering, big data analytics, neuroscience, physiology, pharmacology, just a fascinating array of different talent. One of the major things that we're doing here is to create tissues and organs for patients, and one of the major areas of focus is to use these tissues for our wounded warriors. And we have currently several programs going on at the institute aimed just at the goal of translating these technologies from the bench to the bedside for our wounded warriors. Starting off in my co-op, I did not know what to expect. And years ago, my mom passed away from breast cancer, and just so happened that the lab I was put with is studying breast cancer. And all the people in my lab were extremely impressed of the skills that I had coming straight out of school. I love the people in my lab. I have never, ever thought that I would learn what I have in such a short period of time. I'm more comfortable. I feel like I'm successful, and I can be successful in the future. After I left the military, I took different types of jobs. I wanted to see what was out there. And normally people don't want to take a multiple amount of jobs because sometimes employers look at that as you really don't know what you want. But at the same time, I want to experience a lot of different fields. I've worked in factories. I've worked for Georgia Pacific. I've worked for many, many places. And it was a different experience. As I was getting older, I said, you know, I don't have a degree yet, and I need to do this while I look to the program. And when I saw environmental science, I said, that's what I want. Before I even looked at the classes, I said, that's what I want because that's the way our future is headed. I was students who were coming from biotechnology. They're not necessarily going to a biotech company. There are other fields also that we traditionally don't associate with biotechnology. For example, wine making is a growing field. North Carolina is investing a lot in vineyard and wine growing, the wine business. And they need a lot of microbiologists for quality control to know for fermentation. And as a matter of fact, we have a major course here that is fermentation on the program here. So a lot of our students who take this course and who finish our program can go and work in the wine industry. Another industry that we never thought about before is the beer industry. Beer is growing. Micro breweries are growing as a specialty. The food industry also, they need to control the growth of bacteria or microorganisms. So anybody coming out of the biotech program is obvious that they will look at biotechnology or biotech companies as an area where they will go to work. But they have a lot of other areas that are suitable for these students also or graduates to make a good living. All of this to come together to create a vibrant biotech sector for the American economy and to make sure that the skilled workforce is there to support that sector. Through the community colleges across the country led by Forsyte Tech, we're making sure that we have the biotech technicians for those jobs of tomorrow.