 All right everybody, I think why don't we take our seats and we'll get started. There's plenty of seats up front here, don't be shy. It's great to see so many of you here this evening. Welcome class of 2023. My name is Kristen McMahon and I am president of the Fairfield University Alumni Association and also a member of the class of 1987. Tonight, the Office of Alumni Relations and the Alumni Association are thrilled to sponsor tonight's Thrive Event, what it means to be a stag. 36 years ago, I sat where all of you are, hard to believe, and I began my life's journey. During my four years at Fairfield, I met lifelong friends who are here tonight. I met my husband. I met incredible professors who changed my life, who set me up professionally and personally, and now I have two daughters here, a junior and a senior. You all have a very similar experience, and I'm really excited for all of you. As part of tonight's Thrive, we wanted to bring in a speaker to challenge you to think about how you're going to engage with each other, the Fairfields community both today and after you graduate. There's no better person to do that than my dear friend, Michael Miller, also a member of the class of 1987. I'm going to read you a little bio about Michael before I turn this over to him. He is a speaker and a consultant who travels approximately 300 nights a year to colleges and campuses around the country. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Fairfield and a master's degree in public administration from Framingham State University in Massachusetts. At Fairfield, Michael served as an RA on the fourth floor of Jokes Hall as student coordinator of the admissions tour guides. He was a DJ on WVOF. He was a campus center employee in the game room, the information desk which was then affiliated with the stagger in, and he also served as the 40th FUSA president. Inside higher education, Michael has been employed as a student affairs administrator at a number of universities in the East and the Midwest, serving in many administrative functions including student activities, student leadership, development, new student orientation, fraternity and sorority life, residential life, and student union management. He is also the co-author of a book entitled, The Now Factors of College Success Now in its second edition. He is also a contributor to a book entitled, Lessons from the Road, Inspirational Insights from Leading Speakers. He has frequently contributed articles to campus activities programming magazine, and you can also see Michael on his recurring segment, three things with Michael Miller to better Connecticut on the CBS affiliate, WFSB TV Channel 3, or at WFSB.com. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Michael. Thank you, Kristin. All right. All right. Yeah. Thanks for clapping. Listen, let's get real. Thrive for you is jive. You hate being a thrive, right? Well, so you can choose to do this two ways. One, we could have a really good time for the next 40 minutes, or you could be miserable here. That's up to you. But I'm here to tell you, I'm passionate about a number of things in my life. One of those things is Fairfield, and tonight we're going to talk, like Kristin said to you, about ways to craft the next 3.5 years you have here. Fairfield is instrumental in the way we live so many years later, right? We graduated in 1987, right? You were barely a thought then, if at all. But yet, Fairfield thrives in our hearts and in our minds, and we care for you more than you'll realize. And I'm going to say this twice during my time with you. When I sat where you did, I did not know that at the time, there were 35,000 alumni who gave a damn about me, right? Because nobody told us that then. That's why we're here tonight, to tell you that you have about 43,000 people that will be looking to support you, to get the kind of job you want, to help you figure out your confusion about your major, to help you through the things that would get you not only through college, but to get you some place where you'd be. I make no apology. I loved Fairfield. I loved it when I was a student and I love it now. So what we're going to talk about is ways for you to really be a stag. And one of the things that we don't talk about enough, something that's really part of the Fairfield story, is that we have friendships here that are uncommon. And I don't know if you've experienced this yet. Have you? Like, talk to your friends out of the colleges, see if they've met the kind of people that you've met. See if they're having the same kind of relationships you're having right now. When you left for the first long weekend, wasn't it hard to say goodbye? You missed your roommate, right? Well, most of you did, not all of you, right? It's important, right? So I can tell you all about what it was like so many years ago, but we have two very special people here and they are both seniors. So Chelsea and Catherine, come up. Chelsea, yes, give it up for them, thank you. Chelsea, will you give a wave? Chelsea is a senior. She is a marketing major. And Catherine is a senior also. And she is a nursing major here at Fairfield. And they are gonna just very quickly tell you their story, a friendship, their story of connection that began many years ago now. So would you just share, first of all, how you met and a little bit about how maybe Fairfield helped you two become as close as you are? So take a listen to this, take it away, you guys. Okay, so Catherine and I, we both lived on Jokes 4th. Is anyone here on Jokes 4th? Yeah, we're in the back. Is anyone on Jokes 4th this year that's here tonight? Yes. I was the RA, by the way, on Jokes 4th, just saying. Yeah, so the first day, we had a dinner with our RA at the Telly. Well, now it was Barone back then, but now it's the Telly. And we met and we met all the girls on our floor. And that started a friendship. And I will say to this day, there are 14 of us who met on Jokes 4th, a few that were not on Jokes 4th, that are literally still best friends today. We all live together. Yeah, do you want to continue that? So on move-in day, I was a nervous, nervous freshman. And I moved in with my roommate, Rachel, and she is a very loud personality and I am a very shy, quiet person. She moved in with her whole Italian family and she had like the nicest stuff, so many things. And I came with like my comforter and that's it. And I was very intimidated. And then Chelsea walks down the hall because I was in the corner room and she introduced herself. And honestly, since then, we've been friends. Like she said, we went to the dinner together, sophomore year, all of our Jokes 4th friends decided to live together again. Junior year, very stressful housing. Some of us wanted to live in the town, or all of us wanted to live in the townhouses. Only one group before got to actually got the townhouses. The other eight of us were left to live in Dolan, which we were like, oh my God, it's gonna be the worst junior year ever. We're gonna be so isolated from all of our friends at the townhouses, but we can both say that Dolan was like our favorite year. Keep going! We, not to be weird, but we call Dolan, what was it, 410? 405. 405, sorry. We call it our oopsie because it's this baby that we didn't want, but we loved it so much. Our oopsie. That's fantastic. And just to reiterate, we're best friends, this summer we both worked in Boston. So listen to this, listen to this, because this summer, they both ended up in Boston, right? Yeah, so. And what happened? Chelsea's from Uxbridge, I'm from Duxbury. We both worked in Boston this summer. We didn't live together, but we saw each other every single weekend. Chelsea saw me more than she saw her high school friends. I saw her more than I saw my high school friends. So I think it just goes to show how special your fair field relationships become, because we spend so much time together and it's amazing. I love, first of all, I love any story of friendship, but this is a natural thing that developed just the way some of your friendships are developing. The point is, this is the end for them. They say goodbye at the end of this year, right? So before they go away, and we're gonna have a hokey moment together. Chelsea, will you tell Catherine something that you want her to know that perhaps you haven't told her? We have not rehearsed this, by the way. But would you share something that you want her to know? Catherine, I love that you're always my dancing buddy whenever we go out. Your energy always lights up a room and every time you are around you make me laugh and smile. I love it. You had to look away, some of you, right? Because she's telling the truth here, right? Good, good. Catherine, tell Chelsea something that you want her to know that maybe you haven't told her. Oh, God. Chelsea, you, over the four years, I think that we have gotten closer every single year. We were obviously great friends freshman year, but I think each year our friendship grew and I'm so glad that I have you as my best friend. I'm so excited to potentially live with you post-grad and, yeah, can't wait to live the rest of our life together. Please give them a round of applause. So what's the point? I want you to know something. I thought that everybody has what we have, right? When I finished Fairfield, I thought, man, college is great. Like, I loved high school, by the way. I'm one of the people that loved high school. Maybe you did too, but I loved college more, right? And I want you to know, I thought, wow, you know, college is great. I have the best friends. Everybody has that. And then I discovered people that went to colleges and I said, did you like college? And they said, yeah. I said, where'd you go to school? And they said, wherever they went. Some place I did not care about. And they said, I said, are you in touch with your friends? And they're like, no. And numerous times I heard that. So I thought, well, maybe that's just my experience at Fairfield, right? Maybe that's just what happened to me, these kind of life changing, kind of personally defining relationships, right? But then I got to tell you something. I was with a woman, she went to UConn, no diss Colleen on UConn. She said to me, she was a professional friend, like not a close friend, but a person I knew well from a professional organization. She came up to me once and she said, can I talk to you for a second? And she was kind of like serious. So I said, yeah. I said, sure. What's the matter? She goes, you went to Fairfield, right? And I said, yeah. She goes, you have a thing with your friends? And I said, what do you mean? She said, like, you've been out for a while. Like, are you close with your people? And I said, crazily close. Now, keep in mind at the time I was living in Chicago, right? We had an encampment of friends here in Connecticut. We have friends in Texas. We had friends in California, right? Everybody kind of moved away. I said, yeah. I said, I'm very close to them. I see them all the time and we live thousands of miles away. She goes, mm-hmm. I said, what do you mean? She goes, well, you know, my husband, he went to Fairfield, right? And I said, yeah. He graduated about 10 years after I did. And he said, he said, you know, he gets into a funk every now and again. I said, what do you mean? She goes, he gets into a funk when he doesn't see his boys. She said, I have to, like, set it up for him. Like, if I know, when he's like in a bad mood, he's short with me. I have to get, I invite his friends to come for the weekend and it changes everything. Is that a Fairfield thing? And I said, I guess it is. It really is. So what's the point? The point is really, really enduring relationships. I need you to know, I moved to Chicago where I knew no one, but one friend, one of my Fairfield friends lived there. And because of him, I met a whole bunch of people that also went to Fairfield. Walking down the street in Chicago was a woman named Audrey. She worked in the campus center like I did. She was about three years old and so I did not know her when we were in college. She was walking down the street, she was wearing a Fairfield sweatshirt. This is in the downtown Chicago in Lincoln Park if you're familiar with it at all. She goes, he goes, did you go to Fairfield? And he went, yes, they began talking in Fairfield's fashion. They met for drinks that night. We are all close with her. We know her children. Her name's Audrey. We're all friends now. It's a really natural connection and thing that happens. So I want you to think about your connections and how you work now while you have time to cultivate these relationships right now. I'm not saying that your best pals now are your best pals three years from now, right? In fact, if you're hanging out with losers, lose them, right? But if you're sure your girls, your boys, your people are your people, hold them close. So being a stag, right, what does that mean? There's five things we're gonna talk about. Five things I want you to know, right? And the first of these is support in so many ways. Support in ways that I'm not sure that you're aware of, right? So do you know that there's a career center? Do you know that there's a career center? Yes or no? Well, did you know that for the rest of your life that career center services you? I know that if I lose my job, Kath Borgman will help me find one, right? That's for the rest of your life, right? That's support in so many ways, right? I moved to Chicago. I don't know what to do. There's a Chicago alumni club in Chicago that we can get connected with other fair-field people. So if you know no one, at least you're gonna get to meet a lot of people. And by the way, those clubs exist all over the United States. San Francisco, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, all of these cities, there's a fair-field alumni club, a place for us to get connected. But I wanna tell you that support is so much more than just career or just meeting people. I need you to know, I was living in Connecticut a few years ago, and I got a phone call. I have two sisters in law. Their names are Donna and Gladys, and I know Gladys is like a weird name, right? You think she's like 99 years old and has a birthmark on her neck, right? She's really cute. She's pretty, but I get a phone call. I'm working at a college near here. I won't say the name of it, but I know, good, yeah. Who cares? I get a phone call, and it's my sister-in-law, Donna. It's my eldest brother's wife. You guys, she's crying when I pick up the phone, right? She's like, hey, Michael, it's Donna, and I need you to come home, okay? So I'm like, yeah, he said, what's the matter? She goes, no, no, no. It's just not good. And the family needs you to come home, okay? So please come home now. I'm like, no, Donna, I'm definitely gonna come home. I said, what is it? She goes, no, I don't wanna say it over the phone, Michael, just call. I said, Donna, you're freaking me out! What happened? She goes, I hate to say this, Michael, on the phone to you, but your brother died. Her husband. He was 42 years old. She was 36, and they have an 11-month-old baby, my nephew, right? My nephew. I don't remember driving from Connecticut to my house. I don't remember going to get closed for the wake and the funeral, right? I don't remember any of that. All I remember is I get to my sister-in-law's house and I'm looking at my nephew. He's 22 years old now, but he was 11 months old, and he's in his playpen, and I look at this kid, and I think, oh my God, he's never gonna know his daddy, my brother. Listen, I know if you have siblings, right? I know they drive you crazy, right? But don't you expect them to be around you, driving you crazy for your whole life, right? Now, I don't know how your family does with these kinds of things. My family's pretty straightforward. We work to get through it, right? We all take our places and push through the problem. Now, I need you to know, at this point in my life, I am 100% totally, absolutely, disgustingly single. I have no one in my life, right? Now, also, I moved away right after Fairfield, so I haven't lived in the neighborhood I grew up with. By the way, I grew up in the Bronx in New York City. Thank you, my people. I don't know anyone there anymore. Everyone, all my high school friends have left also. Nobody's there anymore, right? So what's my job? My job is to take care of my mother who lost her child, right? Take care of my brother. My brother and my other brother were very close, right? I have nieces and nephews, by the way, two of those nieces just graduated from Fairfield in May, happy to report that to you, but they were babies, children then. So what's my job? My job is to do what I need to do to help us get through this, right? Horrible moment. I gotta tell you something, and that's what I do, by the way. At one moment, though, I sit down in the funeral chapel, right? And you know, when a younger person dies, it's mayhem, it's packed, right? My brother had a lot of friends, so there were a lot of people there, but this was an oddly quiet moment in the funeral chapel. So I go in and I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, man, this is my big brother, right? This is like the darkest moment of my life. I don't, up to that point, I hadn't had something so terrible happen to me, right? At least in my recent history. And I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, man, I'd love to make sense about this. You know, I'd love to kind of figure this out. I don't know how I feel about this, because this was my big brother. He was eight years older than me. You guys, he was the worst big brother in that he beat me up like nobody else ever beat me up, right? But he was also like the best big brother. This guy took me to the circus. He took me to the beach. He took me to sleigh riding. He dated a girl while I was in middle school, like when I was like nine or 10, and he was like 17. They went to the movies every Sunday night. They had a standing movie date. Do you know, he took me to every movie from like fifth grade to eighth grade, right? I went with them on every date. And now he's gone. And I don't know what to do. And I have nobody to talk to. I'm alone. And I'm sitting there, you guys. And I think to myself, man, you are like, you're in the worst space and you're a loser too. Like what happened? You have nobody. You have nobody to talk to. Who am I gonna talk to? My brother? My mother about this? They're worse off than I am, right? And I swear to God, I'm feeling like the loneliest loser. And I look up at the funeral chapel door and who walks in. My very best friend from Fairfield, my very best friend that I worked with in the campus center. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas with his wife. And the two of them walk in. And I think to myself, oh my God, am I just blessed? Right, am I just the luckiest dude in the world? The minute I feel alone, somebody takes care of me. No, my best friend from Fairfield. And he did not come because of my brother. He came to take care of me. And that's part of my Fairfield story. And I wanna tell you something. That woman over there, the woman who said hello to you, my friend Kristen, my dear friend Kristen. She had just had their second child in Chicago. So she couldn't come with her husband who also lived on jokes for her with me. They couldn't come. So you know what they did? They sent her husband's parents to be there for me. Their parents barely knew me, let alone my brother. And they show up for me. And more and more and more. I'm telling you, support in every way you need it. Support in times that you won't believe that you get it. I want you to use your 3.5 years left to cultivate this kind of thing. It's in our genes. It's what we're about. It just happens. But if you play it smart, it will happen even better for you, right? Okay, I want you to know about this. Where did we rank this year? In US News and World Report. Who knows this year? Number three, right? Last year we were number one. So what? We're on the top of the list. Best schools of nursing. Top 20 business schools, right? Do you know this? Right, and how do we act? Ah, shucks. Gee, Fairfield's neat, right? And you were just neat. We're cool. It's time that we stop acting like that. Fairfield is something incredible, right? You don't realize who you walk among. No, look at me. There's a loser that you push around when you go to a beach party, right? You're sneaking into the townhouses, right? And you're with your friends and you think they're just a drunk, right? I'm gonna tell you, don't be so fast. Start to get conscious who you're walking among. Do you see the elephant? Can you see that elephant right there? Okay, I'm gonna tell you about our friend, Caitlyn. Caitlyn was a biology major. Now, I took a course here called Russian History. It was part of the core. It was the hardest, one of the hardest classes I ever took. Kristen was in the same class, although we didn't know it at the time. The hardest class. Dr. Buchek would give quizzes that you literally stayed up all night to study for. 10 point quiz that you were lucky if you got 50 out of five out of 10 on these quizzes, right? So, typical scenario, you know this. We gather in the lounge on Gonzaga 3, go G3, we sit there. Now, we get the coffee pot. It's me, Caitlyn from New Jersey and Annie from Texas. And we're seeing that we're gonna study all night. It's about 1.30 in the morning. Now, as you know, and I know you've had this experience, you know when you're supposed to be studying for a test with your friends and you have the best conversations of your life, you talk about everything about what you should be working on for the test, right? The most serious conversations, right? That's what's going on. So, Annie and I decide that we're gonna go for it with Caitlyn. In Fairfield fashion, we're gonna give Caitlyn her business. So I said, Caitlyn, how's it going in biology? She goes, it's fine. I said, no, it's not fine. And he said, it's not fine at all. I said, Caitlyn, you suck at biology because she was getting basically Cs in biology, right? I said, Caitlyn, we don't understand why you're a biology major. She goes, no, no, I like it. I said, I get you like it, but you're not good at it, right? And he says, you suck, Caitlyn. You should be an art major. Now, I never saw a person that could sculpt to pencil sketches. This woman had a talent at design and drawing. I said, you should be an art major. You should be a visual design major. Her mother was an art dealer, this woman, right? So she's like, no, no, I like it. I like it. The faculty helps me. I said, the faculty helps you and the best you're getting is Cs. Caitlyn, you should change your damn major. Fast forward two years later, she applies to graduate school for biology. She's accepted to one and only one program, the University of Hawaii. So she has to go. Now, keep in mind, Caitlyn likes the big animals, right? Caitlyn is not allowed to study the big animals. She gets placed in a program by the people at the University of Hawaii. Entomology, do you know what that is? Study of insects. She gets the complete opposite. So I need you to know that Caitlyn, you know, she goes. She loves biology, apparently. We still don't understand this. We think she's ridiculous, right? She goes and she studies biology at the University of Hawaii. Now, in the summer, one of the faculty member who studies big animals offers positions to graduate students to go to the bush in Namibia to watch the elephants. Caitlyn is going. When she gets there, she is the low person on the pecking order, right? She's no one. So she has to do the overnight shift watching the elephants. Now, keep in mind, it is the bush of Africa. There is no light. There is no electric. She's wearing night goggles, right? And she's photographing these elephants in the dead of night. She's looking at this elephant. Now, you may know this because you're smarter than I am. Elephants apparently communicate by stamping. The pads of their feet are one of the ways they communicate with each other. So this one elephant is doing this weird thing with their foot. And she's looking at this and she's taking like a thousand pictures of it, you guys. And she goes, this looks familiar. This is like this. I've seen this somewhere. This pose, I've seen it. So she goes in her computer. She looks at the pictures of the insects and there's an insect with their little tentacle doing the same thing. This woman proved a relationship between the way large animals and insects communicate. Wait a minute. This woman is the host of a TV show on Animal Planet. She got her PhD in biology at the University of California. She is now an adjunct professor and director of the large animals program at Stanford University. Who was right and who was wrong? That's my classmate whose house I slept at every weekend at the beach. She rolled me in after many parties, right? That's Caitlyn. My Caitlyn, right? So I wrote her an email after she wrote her first book, by the way. She wrote a fiction book on a tome of love of elephants, right? She writes this book. I write, Caitlyn, I'm feeling particularly bad right now. So she writes back why I said, well, remember when I told you not to be a biology major? I'm really sorry. She goes, I remember that and that's all she said. But I saw her at our last reunion and it was a love fest, okay? How about our friend Pete Pranavost from our class? Pete was in RA with me. Do you know that time magazine named our classmate, Peter Pranavost, one of the 100 most influential people in the world? No, no, no, no, no, no. Not in Connecticut, not in New England, not in the United States and the world. He's a MacArthur fellow. He's a person who got his MD at Johns Hopkins. This was a person I hung out with at the beach. We dug holes and drank beers sitting in a pit. Yeah, you don't know who you're walking among. I want you to know we are totally on top. We are second to no one and look at me right now. If you're sitting here, still remembering that you were rejected from whatever college, get over it. Look where you are. Good for you. There's few better places you can be. So I want you to get with it right now, right? How about this? You pay a lot to go here, yes or no? Fairfields is expensive, yes or no? Here's something you don't wanna hear. The actual cost of this experience is not covered by the money you spend. There's a thing in college admissions called the discount rate, meaning what you pay versus what it really costs. There's a gap, by the way, and you can't have all this plus the Convocation Center, plus that beautiful Dolan, which by the way I didn't have when I went here, right? You can't have all this without having the money to put it forth, right? So what does that mean? What am I telling you? You think I'm gonna hit you up for money? No, I know you. You're dirt poor and that's okay. You're supposed to be, but I want you now to start developing a consciousness that what you pay, even if you're paying the whole thing, if your parents and you are sucking it up to pay the whole thing, it does not cost what, you do not pay what it costs. And don't you get a scholarship? Well, let's go there right now. How many of you are on a scholarship of some kind? Show me hands. Good, good, good. How many of you have eaten in the Tully? Show me, show me. Good, look at all of you. Now, how many of you have been in Rafferty Stadium? Show me. Yeah, I know you all were because there was a freshman thing in there, I know, right? How about how many of you have studied in the Domenna Nicelius Library? Show me. Well, then every one of you should understand that giving matters. And by the way, I'm not asking you to give anything now. I'm asking you to think about that Domenna, that guy who the library is named for, he and his wife gave $5 million for that thing to be renovated. Why did they do that? Maybe they get a tax write off, but you know what? I don't think he needs it. He loves Fairfield and he cares about you. You've been touched in a million ways by the generosity of people who sat where you sat. And we just want you to start thinking about that. We want you to start thinking about how you give back when your time comes. Now, your senior year, there's gonna be a thing called the senior gift and you will hopefully donate some money to that, right? Usually you'll give $20.23, right? Because that's what you graduate. Excuse me for spitting on you. I'm sorry, my dear. I'll take care of dry cleaning for you. So you'll give some kind of gift just as though you should support a Fairfield, but I need you to know something. Do you know that in the rankings, do you care about how Fairfield ranks? You want Fairfield to be ranked? You know it's in your interests for us to do very well in the college ranking guides, right? Do you know that they use giving as a metric? So in other words, the people who ranked the overall impact of a college, they look at how the alums do. They look at how much we make after we graduate. Do you know that last year we edged out Yale? The average Fairfield grad, six months out after graduation made more money than the Yale grad. Do you know how much I love that? Kristen told you that I contribute to a TV show called Better Connecticut. Do you know that I found a way to work that in? I actually had the nerve to give that statistic as part of something that was not really related, but I had to get it out there, right? I wanted more people to know than me that this is the truth, right? So to think about that, right? But the other thing that they look at, one of the other things they look at, how much the alums give, not how much they give, what percentage of alums give, right? So even if all of us gave a dollar, that would affect the percentage and that affects people's attitude to how they rate us. So I want you just to think about that. I'm not asking you for one cent right now, but I'm asking you to think about this. What will you give back for your experience, right? So you have 3.5 years to really take advantage of everything. If it goes the way it should, we want you to give something back. And if you can't give money, give your time. Can't give your time, give money, right? That's how it works, but actually giving matters. So when your class comes together, because you know, Catherine and Chelsea are the president and the vice president of the alumni, the student alumni association. They're the conduit between the alumni board and students and the alumni office and students. And they work on a whole host of things, alumni reunion and all that stuff. You may want to get involved with that because it's really fun. But more than that, think about what you're going to give back to the university as you move forward. I hope that that is in your consciousness because people before you have given back. And we want this thing to live on and get better and better and better. Unfortunately, it does, right? So the last thing I want you to think about is, and it's the last S in stags, is sustaining relationships. I want you to look at that picture. You can't see it probably too well, but you'll notice it says the 87 stags turn 40. When my friends turned 40 years old, we all went to our dear friend's family's home in Scottsdale, Arizona. There were 20 of us that graduated in my class and spouses and significant others. So we're about 40 people. And I made those shirts for our friends. And by the way, isn't that beautiful, right? Isn't that so great? Some 18 years after we graduated, we're all still together, right? But when I was looking at the faces of my friends, I realized that we had entered a space where your friends also are your family. Kristen has two daughters, right? She told you, there's a junior and a senior here. They call me Uncle Michael. My friend Janine, who was in this room, are you here at my Jeannie? Yeah, she has two children. I'm the godfather of her eldest son and I'm the confirmation sponsor of our eldest daughter. I was the first person to see Kristen's daughter after she was born because they lived in Chicago. I was the first person to see Christine other than her father, right? And we enter a space of relationship that becomes confusing and dramatic and passionate. And we wanna invite you into that. We wanna invite you into what we know to be true about what Fairfield means. And this is what I want you to think about. It's not just now. It's not just next year. It's not when you live at the beach. You're seeing your year, right? It's forever. And the best part, the thing that we are all exceedingly jealous of you, and we are jealous of you, is that you have another 3.5 years to do this. So figure your life here out. Suck every bit of the good stuff out of it so that you feel exactly the way we do. Sorry, exactly the way we do when you go. Now, here's what I wish for you because I'm gonna let you get out of here. You have to swipe when you go to get credit for this. I wish a couple of things for you. One, I know how you feel right now. This is not a good time in the semester. All you want is Thanksgiving, right? And I have bad news for you. When you come back for Thanksgiving, it's a worse. It's your first finals. It's hell and horror. So what does that mean? Listen to what Michael's saying. Stay close to your people, right? Leave to each other to get through the misery of your finals. You will look horrible when it's over. I'm telling you, right? And second, second thing we wish for you. So stay close. Get ready to come back in January to kick Fairfield's butt, but more than that, please, please, please know this. You have 43,000 people who would love to hear from you. You have 43,000 people that will help you make. Yo, you don't have family support? Sorry for that. You don't have someone in your life that can guide you through becoming a physician because you don't have anyone? I don't care. We have people who will help you through that, right? We have people who will one-on-one mentor you, take you where you want to go, let you shatter them and work. All we need to know is that you want that. So I'm giving you right now my contact information. You don't know where to go? Come to me. I will get you where you need to go. There is a Fairfield alum who will help you make the most, not only of this, but probably become a dear friend as well. So with that, I wish you nothing but the best for a great night tonight. And more than that, for your attention today. Thank you so much.