 Hello, my name is Brad Snyder. I'm a formerly a lieutenant in the Navy. I was an EOD officer for approximately six years. I was injured in September of 2011 and during my recovery had the opportunity to participate in the Paralympics in London in 2012, resulting in two gold medals and a silver. Now I'm currently awaiting my transition out of active duty status and into the civilian world. I'm working as an intern with a small software company as well as an ambassador for a nonprofit called the Commit Foundation. My experiences as a diver in the Navy actually prepared me really well from a task-oriented perspective to my daily necessities as a blind person. So being able to dive in a silty environment where you can't necessarily see, you always have to know where your buddy is and you have to know where your tools are and you have to know what task is at hand and you have to be able to work yourself through an environment without your sight. So when I woke up in the hospital without my sight, it was not the first time that I had to work through that situation and I felt as though my experiences as a diver prepared me well for that. I had a lot of opportunities to kind of test my mental endurance. There's a lot of situations that are very stressful or really you have to keep a can-do attitude through some austere circumstances, whether it is patrolling in Afghanistan or it's deciding to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. You know, those sorts of situations in the Navy prepared me well for situations of adversity. When I first started out in the Navy, I was terrified of public speaking. I was terrified of standing in front of people and having to make impactful decisions. I was terrified of being wrong or making a mistake. But my experiences in the Navy have really eroded it that that thought or that fear and I'm now able to move into each environment with a lot of confidence, a lot of a lot of leadership ability in tough environments and that's something that sets apart veterans. My goal with all of my actions is to inspire that person who's been dealt a difficult hand and they're laying in a hospital bed, and they're not sure what's next. Hopefully they'll see my story and say, you know, I can go out and do that. I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna hop on a hand cycle or I'm gonna go start my own company or I'm gonna go go back to what I used to love doing before I got hurt and hopefully that's the positive impact that my story holds and that's where I garner my motivation.