 My name is Ilham Ali. I'm from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and this is my honors experience. I think the Honors College has set me up for a lot of great opportunities going forward, and it's something that I'm really thankful for. The Honors College provides a lot of great training, and I think at the University of Alabama, you can really set yourself up for anything that you wanted to. Coming into the Honors College, research was always the central part of, you know, what I wanted to get out of my college experience. I came in as a Randall Research Scholar, and to me, research is a lot about the process of innovation and understanding kind of the boundaries of your field and how you can push it both in technological ways and societal ways. The first project I worked in had to do with bilinguals and understanding how they learned and transferred language from one generation to the next, which I think is really tied to my personal experience. I grew up in a bilingual home as well, and my parents are from Sudan, so understanding and speaking in different languages is really integral, I think, to who I am. And another project that I worked on is more in line with my major of environmental engineering, so I worked on predicting floods in different areas of the world, and both of the communities that I come from, both in Sudan and here in North Alabama, are really prone to flooding, and I think it's something that I've grown up with and always seen, so being able to get an education and understand more the mechanics of that and what to do about it has been really empowering. Advanced research is always about taking what you've learned in the classroom and applying it to a real-world situation where you can help people and help advance in better lives. Being at the university is really about what you can make of your time here. I think there's a lot of different avenues that you can pursue and a lot of different people that you can be exposed to, and that's a really great thing to carry forward into your life and to make use of during your time here.