 Purdue's minority engineering program brought Don and Liz Thompson together and launched them to success. Don as CEO of McDonald's and now head of a venture capital firm, and Liz as a leader in education and philanthropy. My name is Don Thompson and I'm currently the CEO and founder of Cleveland Avenue. My name is Elizabeth Thompson, people call me Liz, and I am currently the president of the Cleveland Avenue Foundation for Education. The significance of the phrase Cleveland Avenue is that it's the street where we both grew up on here in Chicago. We lived four blocks apart and didn't realize it until the first day on campus at Purdue back in August of 1980. I thought she was kind of cute. He was I. So while we were at Purdue, the influence of the minority engineering program was so great in our lives. It helped us make a giant leap from high school kids from, in my case, Chicago, really nervous never having been in a supremely diverse environment as Purdue represented. The minority engineering program helped us make that giant leap through giving us early introductions to the engineering courses that we were going to take by introducing us to professors on campus. It helped us in ways that we probably didn't realize at the time, but we now know without a doubt helped us transition into the adults that we were to become. I guess if I look back and I had to characterize my career thus far, I would say it's been a career of one opportunity and two, I would call it risk taking. You know, started out as an engineer at Northrop Grumman. Wonderful career, loved it, and then an opportunity to go to a company that was so focused on people and operations and systems, but it was just a different widget. It was hamburgers and fries and drinks and service at McDonald's Corporation, which I first thought was McDonald's Douglas when they called, but ultimately, yeah, we came to McDonald's. But I think it, and even now into what we do in the venture capital space, what Purdue taught us was that every opportunity was also a problem to be solved. And that is the thing that we talk to students a lot about. Every opportunity is simply a problem to be solved. Thanks to Purdue, there have been doors of opportunities open to me and to our family because education is that exposures, that opportunity to open up those doors. And we've been blessed to be able to walk through those doors because we have a confidence and we have a confidence that a lot of which was gained through our upbringing and it was gained through being in school at Purdue and the learnings that we have from the university. Thanks to Purdue, I now have a platform, we have a platform to help countless young people who are on the same journey that we were on, perhaps from neighborhoods where there were not a lot of resources. We are now able to say, we can help you. We can help you start this journey and hopefully through programs like the Minority Engineering Program and others at Purdue, we can help see you to the end. And the other thing I'd like to say is thanks to Purdue, I met the love of my life, who I now call my husband, who's the most wonderful man I've ever met. So thank you Purdue. That was Don and Liz Thompson. Look for more stories at Purdue.edu slash footprints.