Neurodegenerative diseases pose a significant threat to public health, but there is currently no effective treatment available. Research into neurotrophic factors such as BDNF has shown promise, but its limited stability and short half-life in the body have hindered its use as a therapeutic agent. Several strategies have been developed to overcome this issue, including the use of polymer-based carriers, lipid-based particles, and nanoparticles. These advances offer hope for the development of more effective treatments for neurodegenerative diseases. This article was authored by Claire Gerald, Angelina Angelova, and Sylveon Lessir.


chaining. Are you ready for this? No. Sit down. Get comfortable. Don't watch us and drive. God, don't watch us and drive. But please watch us. I'm not saying don't watch us. Chaining. Various procedures for teaching behavior chains.   A behavior chain is a set of behaviors, right? Let's take tying your shoes or even getting into your car. One of the two. Let's go back to shoes. Anyway, you have the shoe, so the response of the shoe, and the next step becomes the SD. The completion of that particular step is the reinforcer, but also the SD for the next step, which is then the SD and the reinforcer for the following steps. You got the shoe, you're pulling it down, you're crossing, so you got SDR. Next step loops, SDR. Makes sense? Behavior chain.


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Good afternoon. Welcome to April's third Thursday event. I'm Janine Bertie Johnson, alumni director. And I welcome all of you who've joined us today. Just a couple of housekeeping details before we get started. I'd love to have you introduce yourselves in the chat. If you would do that and please mark. If you have a technical concern at any point during the webinar, you can send a chat message to AMBS webinar. And if you have a question or comment for Mary Ann, we ask that you use the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen. You can find that by hovering over the bottom there. And I'll be watching for those questions and I'll be happy to answer them. If you have a technical concern at any point during the webinar, and I'll be watching for those questions and comments, and I will then send those to Mary Ann. Please note that the webinar, including questions is being recorded. Turning now to our conversation. Mary Ann Weber is director of enrollment for the seminary. She began working at AMBS in 2019 as admissions counselor and director of student services. And in summer of 2022, she became the director of the admissions team. Mary Ann graduated from Eastern Mennonite University in 1989 with a degree in early childhood education and taught school in Los Angeles through Mennonite voluntary service. And then also in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. She also served in the Philippines with Mennonite Central Committee from 1995 to 98. And worked in the resource library of Lancaster Mennonite Conference from 98 to 2001. Then she came to AMBS where she earned a master of arts in Christian formation degree in 2003. Following seminary, she served as MCC Great Lakes human resources coordinator from 2003 to 2010. And Menomedia as managing editor for curriculum from 2010 to 17. Mary Ann will start by answering several questions I've given to her. And after that we'll have time for your questions and comments as well. Mary Ann, thanks for joining us today. What would you like to tell us about yourself as an introduction? Well, this was kind of difficult because there's so many things I could say. But I thought I'll just start here. I've been in Indiana just for a couple of decades. And I arrived to study at AMBS, as Janine mentioned. And I earned my master's in Christian formation. At that time, there was also a concentration. So I did the Christian education concentration. And I'll share more about that later. I now live in Goshen with my husband, Gerald. We attend Benton Mennonite Church. And I serve on the pastoral leadership team there. And I've been there for a long time. A fun fact between the two of us, Gerald and I have studied and or worked at nine different Mennonite schools. It's kind of like we embody Mennonite education agency in our household. We're both readers. So if you visit us at home, you might be kind of bored. We sit in our recliners. We read during the evening. And sometimes we might even shake it up and sit on the sofa to read. But we're in the same genres. And so it's not like we talk about our reading very much. In addition to reading, though, we do play games. We work on projects around the house. We recently redid the deck in the back of the house. So we're planning to get it ready to use as the weather gets warmer and we're having fun doing that. Every fall I plant lots of bulbs. I just surprised myself every spring to see what's coming up. And so next to our new deck is an amazing assortment of red tulips and yellow daffodils kind of all mingled together. And it looks really pretty. I've forgotten I had done that. And I noticed them a few days ago and it's just a beautiful color combination. So I'm quite pleased with that. This coming fall, I think I need more crocus bulbs in the front yard. I didn't have quite enough this spring. So that'll give me something to work at. Gerald and I, we have one cat. She's almost 18 years old. She's named Miranda. We got her from a farm when she was a kitchen from Gerald's uncle's farm. We also got a litter mate. But that cat died about a year and a half ago because we're readers. We named them after Shakespeare characters Beatrice and Miranda. And I don't know if you know of any Shakespeare plays well enough, but Miranda is a character in the tempest. And if you know anything about her character, we think that Miranda, our cat, really embodies her namesake quite well. And she still runs and jumps around. So even though she's 18 years old, it feels like she'll be with us for quite some time. Thank you. And another question I like to ask people is, can you tell us about a time when you experienced God or God's presence in a special way? This is another question. Yeah. And this was another question that how do I filter through what I will say, because there's so many, so many ways that I've experienced God in powerful ways. But I just thought of something that's happening right now. And it happens every year in Northern Indiana. I experienced God in a powerful way. And I think that's what I would say as spring happens, especially here. And as I drive to and from work, as I walk around our neighborhood, the parks, I just see the lovely sights. I hear the sounds that are springtime. The trees, they're budding. They're looking gorgeous. The flowers are coming up. The colors are bright. The grass is green. The sky is even more blue. Birds are singing. And I think that our God is not just a creator, but a creative creator.  We lost my mother-in-law at the beginning of March. She was just a few weeks shy of her 96th birthday. She had a good life and a good death as deaths go. But as we grieve, I'm just thankful for her life, the relationship we had. And when the spring happens, just the sights, the sounds all around me, it reminds me there is hope. There's life. And there's a God who surrounds us and holds us and loves us deeply. And it's a beautiful world. And here's something I think about. Knowing that we're created in the image of this creative creator gives me lots to think about. What does that mean for me and my life as I go about my tasks? They're just a motivator to me as I think about my relationship with God, with other people and the world around me. And I've lived in places where there wasn't a change of seasons as we experience in Indiana per se, more like maybe a sunny season and a rainy season. Temperatures were warm. I was okay with that. I'm not a cold weather person. And I never once missed the change of seasons from warmer temperatures to colder ones. But now that I live where there are four seasons, the early springtime is such a treat for me. It's just the promise of good things to come. It's the promise of life. And I'm just grateful. Indeed. And I'm curious what attracted you to come to AMBS as a student? Yeah, so I'm originally from Pennsylvania and I took a rather unique route to get to AMBS as a student. After college, I wanted to do something other than return home. And honestly, I could think of nothing more than what is now a voluntary service. I just didn't know what other options would be. And so I signed up. As an education major, I went to teach at a Christian school run by a Mennonite church in Inglewood, California. It's just right outside of South, South Central Los Angeles. It's just about a block from South Central LA. So coming to orientation for voluntary service was the first time I was ever in Elkhart. It was the house along Prairie Street that Mennonite Board of Missions at that time had. And that's where our orientation was held. And every day we'd have meetings and we go on these excursions. In this white 15 passenger van, you know the type. One day we drove by AMBS. It's the first time I had seen the seminary. I mean, keep in mind I had no idea I would ever be back in the area. So I'm going around Elkhart. And I'm going to be back in Elkhart. I've just been going around Elkhart. And I'm going to be back in Elkhart. I'm in Elkhart on Elkhart Avenue. And the leader of the program pointed out the seminary. And she made this comment in jest. That single women who are in BS either get married or go to seminary afterward. And having never considered seminary prior to this. that. Up to that point, I thought all I had wanted to do was teach school. But I also wanted to do some other things and Jeanine told you about some of those things. And all of those experiences just made me determined to go to seminary and I did. And so 12 years after that experience in the BS orientation, I came to AMBS. And I found people who had similar experiences to mine. I found people who were able to help me process things that I had experienced. And I found theological insights. I found talking points for these experiences. It was just a very formative time for me, a personal highlight for sure. When I was at seminary, I majored in Christian formation because I had been a school teacher. And I had also taught Sunday school and Bible school for years. I had started teaching Sunday school when I was 14 and hindsight, I just don't know of churches, allowing 14 year olds to teach Sunday school, but I so badly wanted to teach. I think I begged them to allow me to teach Sunday school and I finally gave in. And then I also taught Bible school. And so with those experiences, it felt like the Christian formation degree and the concentration of Christian education would fit well with my skillset. But I had no idea what I would do upon graduation. And so I worked for MCC again, then for menomedia. And I returned to AMBS almost five years ago, as Jeanine said, versus an admissions counselor. Then when the previous director retired, I became the director of enrollment. When I was, you know, and I think about my time as a student quite a bit, because when I was a student, I just found the learning community to be one of encouragement and care. And I find that true today, even though many years have passed, there's a new whole new section has been built onto the seminary buildings, new teaching faculty, different students, but I still find this to be a very caring community. And certainly, you know, this was formative to me when I was a student. It's formative to me now. And in my role, I'm just delighted to have a role that helps people also experience the formation that happens through seminary studies. Even as I, you know, talk about seminary to others, I always think about how casually it was mentioned to me. We never know how our words will impact someone or where it will lead them. And we also don't know if it will take 12 years for them to get there. So a part of my role is encouraging others to step into this amazing experience that is AMBS. Yes, it truly is a mystery how those little seeds germinate, grow, sometimes take a while to come above ground, but the roots are growing there. We don't even see it. So you already kind of answered the question I was going to ask about how you came back, were there particular things when you saw the job description posted that you thought, oh, that sounds like something that would be interesting to me? Absolutely. When I saw the job description, as I already said, AMBS was so informative to me. When I saw the job description initially, I was like, wow, now I get to actually be paid for telling people about AMBS. I mean, I've been telling people all along about AMBS and how wonderful it is to be a student there and have tried to encourage people to study here. And so when I saw this job description, it just resonated with me because it just would allow me to share the good news of AMBS with others in a more formal way. And I really enjoy that. I've just met so many wonderful people along the way. I've had such good conversations and it's exciting to be here. So tell us a little bit about your role. What are the kinds of things you're doing in a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis? Just what does the director of enrollment have on their plate? You know, I think the director of enrollment, the job is just to ensure that AMBS continues to have students. And that happens in many varied ways. The landscape, it's just different than when I was a student. Of course, that was over 20 years ago. When I was a student, everyone needed to study on campus. And because I was living in Pennsylvania, I had to move to campus so that it could study. People had to live on campus or close enough to campus that they could commute. And so a highlight was getting to know other students in a personal way. Certainly the professors, the other employees at AMBS. I just appreciated being immersed in the seminary experience. And I really enjoyed the invigorating conversations. The whole time was just invaluable to me. But in more recent years, AMBS students can study where they live as they study online. And noticing a trend that instead of going to seminary and then determining next steps in ministry, many of our students are already involved in ministry or with agencies, and they're already pastoring, they're already leading agencies, and they want seminary studies to enhance what they're already doing. So a challenge for the enrollment department is connecting with leaders and pastors to help identify people with whom they serve who would benefit from a seminary education. And to do that, we also encourage prospective students to try class as a guest student. Usually it's an online class to see if they resonate with seminary. And many times our guest students then do apply for admission. More recent trend is the work of AMBS around the world. So we have learning cohorts in Ethiopia and in South Korea. All of the applications for those folks do go through the enrollment department. Additionally, we have just in the last year started a Spanish language graduate certificate program. Now we need to work with translators to process the Korean and Spanish applications in Ethiopia. English is used. So there's no translation needed there, but there's different layers of complexity to these processes. And I am just amazed and gratified to read applicant files just to learn about their calls to ministry, how they believe in AMBS education will serve them well. And in more recent years, we've also had more international students study on campus than we had previously. Sometimes the application process is a challenge. We do have to navigate cultural expectations and differences. And so this is yet another layer of complexity. But again, I'm just always amazed and gratified to read applicant files. I do believe AMBS just continues to attract quality applicants. They're motivated by their love for God and their desire to be part of the bigger world, whatever that might mean. I noticed a trend, particularly with international students who study on campus, the masters in theology and peace studies is a big draw. In their application process, they share about conflicts in their home communities and their home countries. And they share how they believe what they learned at AMBS will help them to better address these conflicts. It's just very humbling for me to read these essays, to be privileged to know these stories, to realize that AMBS has a role to play in the larger happenings in the world around us. But just to give you an idea of other functions within the department, we also work with financial aid, scholarships, student loans. And not only do we work with applicants before they get here, but also when they arrive, we have student services is housed in this department as well. So to give you an idea of what happens with student services, using the example of international students, it means that we would help our students get health insurance policies. We help them enroll their children in local schools if they bring their families. We help them establish bank accounts and we address other basic needs. This past year, student services also provided a resourcing event with some speakers to share with students about mental health issues and challenges students should be aware of. Another thing that we did along with campus ministries, we sponsored conversations between the students and President David Bushart, another conversation between students and our academic dean, Beverly Lapp. So there's just many ways that our office is involved with student functions prior to them arriving at AMBS as students and also while they're here. Fortunately, the Enrollment Department just has a very caring and thoughtful team and we just work really hard to meet applicant and student needs. Yeah, for full disclosure here, I have to claim this is a part of, I'm a part of this department and it's a lively and fun group. We laugh a lot in our meetings. I really enjoy that. But right now has been a really busy time in the admissions team. Can you explain why this time of the year is just kind of frantic at points. It does feel that way at times. Yes, frantic is a good word. Yeah, so it has to do with people wanting to start their studies in August, just a few months away. So we have scholarship application deadlines of March 15. So it is important that's that applicants apply prior to them and get their scholarship applications in. And then there's always the scholarship committee that needs to meet and determine scholarship awards. And then we have to let the applicants know what their award is going to be. For us applicants, things are a little trickier this year. We do. You may have heard in the news about some FAFSA issues with the US government loan student loans. So we are figuring out workarounds. Fortunately, we have a small student body who would take advantage of student loans. And in that way, we're able to develop workarounds. We are just aware and empathetic to learning institutions that have thousands of students and the extra work that this would place on them because the financial aid applications and student loan applications just are not working well this year. So this is a busy time of year when we think of applications, when we think of scholarships and financial aid. And even as we do that, we're still getting applications. We're still getting communicating with people who want to start this summer, who want to maybe start a year from now. And so at one time, when I began my job, I kept thinking there's got to be a downtime. Not really. I know this is not it. But maybe October, not quite sure. Well, another factor with maybe you can say something about how many students hope to come from somewhere else in the world to Elkhart. And what percentage of those make it through like getting all their materials together that they have to turn in? And then what percentage of those can collect enough money to be able to come so that we can give them the papers they need to apply for a visa. And then there's another cut there in terms of the number of people who go for a visa appointment and can actually receive a visa to come. Can you describe a bit of how big of a group we start with for how many students actually arrive on campus? And what happens to the students who aren't able to get a visa? That's a lot of questions. We talk about an enrollment funnel. Okay. So if we have a funnel at the top or all the people who might consider it at the bottom are the ones who actually arrive. Okay. So when we talk about international students and to just define that these are students outside US and Canada and students who are not planning to join the cohorts that are in country or wanting to do online studies through AMBS. So these are folks who want to study on campus. And many times as I mentioned that theology and peace studies is a big draw. So when we look at this funnel at the top within the past year, now I don't have the numbers exactly in front of me. So don't quote me. These are estimates. Within the past year, we have maybe had 140 people start filling out applications for admissions. Okay. That doesn't mean they will get very far. Some of them fill in their name, their address, and we are in communication with everyone who starts an application. Some of them, they don't follow up. And so those who actually complete an application estimating in the last year, maybe about 50 of those completed actually completed their application. That means they finished filling out their form. But we're not done yet because we also need transcripts from their undergraduate and graduate schools. If they have done that, we also need to collect their references. And we have three references for each student. We also need to get adequate essays or paragraphs as we now call them. We ask our applicants three questions that they need to write responses to. And so to complete an application file, we need to get all of those items as well. So in the past year, approximately 30 people completed their application file. So you can see already how this funnel is narrowing down. Most, not all of them, as we read through, as we have conversations, sometimes I'll do a Zoom conversation or Google Meet conversation with applicants, as the Admission Committee gathers information. Not all of them are accepted as students, but most are. Then they need to apply for scholarships and after scholarships, they will receive a cost of attendance. And this gives them an estimate of what funds they will need for their seminary education here at AMBS for one year. And we make it clear that they can expect this each year, this type of cost each year. It is then the applicant who needs to provide proof of that funding and also needs to have 50% of that funding here on their AMBS account. When we have 50% of that funds here on their AMBS account and we have proof of funding, which is promissory notes, bank statements, things like that, then we turn information over to our registrar, who works with the Department of Homeland Security to create accounts for these applicants to say that they are eligible for their student visa interviews at the U.S. Embassy. Having money, proving that they have funds, is a DHS requirement. So we are following DHS standards by doing that. Now, of those, those are funnels narrowing even further, I believe we had 12 who could provide proof of funding. Of and so they went for student visas. Of those, three were able to get their visas and arrive on campus this past year. So it is an arduous process. We so value the participation of our international student body here on campus. Our lives, our classes are so much more full because of it. But there are many hoops to go through. There are many hurdles to cross. And it's just not for the faint of heart. And I'm so thankful. Each time an international student arrives, I just breathe a sigh of relief that they are here. As far as those up higher in the funnel, as I mentioned, some don't really follow through with completing the application. Some realize financially this isn't going to work and might want to switch to online studies. It at least eliminates the cost of living here. And the flight and that kind of thing, their transportation back and forth. But we are just thankful for the ones who are able to be here. Yeah, it is quite a process. Now the board, the ambious board starts meeting today. And tomorrow you're going to give them a report as one of the members of the ad cabinet. Are there particular things you haven't talked about yet that you want to share with the alumni about maybe things you're going to share in your board report? Yeah, several things. I think alumni would be good for alumni to know. And that is that in my board report, there's a handy little graph so that our board can see the upward trajectory of our enrollment. And that for the last number of years, our enrollment is going up. And when I say enrollment going up, I mean all of the people who study in our academic programs around the world. So when you come to campus, you might notice fewer students actually on campus than what there had been a number of years ago. That's because we have people from around the world who are ambious students studying. And I am hoping and praying that that number continues to go up this next year. It's actually very exciting to look at that graph. I'm sorry I don't have that here for you to put up. And just to know that there are people who want to study at ambious is really gratifying. I will also with the board. So with the board I'm sharing that chart. I'm sharing some numbers. I'm also going to share a little bit about an enrollment strategic plan that the enrollment team has been working on and the enrollment team consists of Janine who's with us on this webinar and also our colleague Teresa. The three of us have been meeting regularly with Betty Priest from Creighton-Sin Co. Betty lives in Ontario. She was actually a student. We overlapped as students a little bit at ambious. Now she has a consulting agency so she knows ambious well and our enrollment is focusing on getting young adults to study on campus. So whether that means they move to campus and live in our apartments as some of you many of you have already done or that means they live in the area and they study on campus. We want to make a concerted effort over the next five years to work at student engagement for young adults. Now we developed five priorities. We developed goals. We developed all kinds of things and so I'm going to share some of that with the with the board. And what's interesting is in March just last month I was in an ATS conference. So that's the Association of Theological Schools of which ambious is a part. And this conference I talked to people from other seminaries. What are they doing? You know it's just a great networking time to get lots of good ideas. And this idea that we're working to try to get younger adults to campus is something that it feels like some other seminaries have kind of already given up on. Many of them are just you know going by way of everything's happening online. Not really trying to bring students to campus at all anymore. Because as I had mentioned earlier students are already involved in ministry. They're already pastoring and doing so many things. Maybe they're too busy to move here or you know what are the dynamics here? We want to take a look at that. As Janine and Teresa and I started we realized we need to first do research on young adults. None of us are young adult age. So we're doing our research. We also that he also pointed out and we're also trying to process this. That when we started to start I'm sorry when we start a strategic plan we should expect to fail. There should be parts that we know aren't going to work. And if something doesn't fail she emphasized it means we're not trying hard enough. This is a big lesson for the three of us because none of us like to fail. But you know what I'm getting ready and I'm getting ready to fail and I'm kind of looking forward to it because I want to try hard and I'm really excited about this plan. So I'll be sharing that with the board tomorrow afternoon. And I also heard her say it's not just how hard we try but whether we're being edgy enough or daring enough. So I really I also really was struck by that and appreciate that. One more question for you from me and then we have some questions coming in from the alumni who've joined us. You might have already said some of this as well but what's a dream that you have for AMBS? Yeah so a dream is that AMBS continues to be a place that impacts the global church and communities particularly with peace theology that's what we're kind of known for. AMBS students they study here they have a lot to offer and they can affect their communities in some pretty amazing ways and if our students practice what they learn their congregations and communities will just be changed for the better. So I continue to believe in our students. I continue to believe that they want to make a difference in the world. I continue to believe that they will see their time at AMBS as a way to do that. And so my dream just to sum it up is that students will be persistent in making the world a better place. That's great. All right we have two questions that have come in already and invite the rest of you if you want to make a comment or ask a question to go ahead and use the Q&A function. I'm going to start with the one that seems a little bit easier to answer. Randall Miller who once had your role asks what presence does enrollment have for recruiting in Canada and do we still use binational language in describing AMBS? Thanks Randy. Yeah thanks Randy. I was pretty sure you would join today and so it's good to have you here. Randy was the one in my role when I became a student. He's the one who processed my files and first person I met when I arrived on campus and took me on the campus tour. So we do have a staff who is in Canada. We're now thinking because of our strategic enrollment plan as ways we can do further cooperation together. We do talk about AMBS as a binational seminary. So we do continue to use that language and we are definitely supported by the denominations of MC Canada and MCUSA. One example of that is a conference that some young adults are planning in British Columbia this summer and they have invited young adults from across Canada and the US but it'll be mostly Canadians to join them to talk about issues of faith that are alive for them now and they asked about having a speaker for me AMBS and we're sending one of our faculty members. We're helping him to be able to be part of that so that our presence is very evident to those young adults who gather for that conference. So that's just an example. Naon Serato has asked what have you learned or seen about Christian formation and from I think he's asking about from the perspective of the different backgrounds of our students that come and are you surprised by how some of them view God and then how does this idea that God is a creative God? How does that help us to teach international students to experience God in the North American context and how does creativity work into all of that? So it's a very complex question, very thoughtful one Naon and thank you so much for that. Yeah Naon thanks for that question and I'm not sure I'm going to do justice with your answer but I'd love to talk about this with you more. I know you're just across the parking lot sometimes so it would be good to to check in with each other and have a larger conversation particularly when we think internationally we do have to be aware of just cultural and differences and the different perceptions and assumptions we bring to conversations and to our studies and Christian formation for me might mean something different than it means for someone who's studying elsewhere. I think in terms of how my faith is formed I think in terms of my relationship with God I think in terms of as as I mentioned earlier as you picked up on this creative creator kind of thing and I recognize that sometimes that is a very North American kind of way of looking at it because I have the time and I have the resources to be able to think those thoughts and have those conversations and I recognize not all of our students have that. So it is important that when our teaching faculty teach that they are able to adapt things. In Korea for example in South Korea with our program we do send some of our professors there they do have to work with translators as they teach but we've also tapped into professors who are from South Korea so that they can also incorporate the appropriate theology into their studies and that makes me feel good about those types of things even in our graduate certificate in the Spanish language. We're using Spanish speakers to teach those courses many of them are from outside of the US or many some of them are from outside of the US so they also bring those differing perspectives. I think that's very important particularly as we think about Christian formation and what I notice with students here on campus what happens with our international students also happens with me when I was a student also happens with our students who are from the US or from Canada and that is our world just expands what we thought we knew what we thought we understood there's another way of looking at that there's another way of being there's another way of growing and developing our faiths and our Christianity and our spirituality that maybe we hadn't thought about before so I would like to think that happens for all of our students and I think that's kind of an expect I think it should be an expectation for students when they arrive here that things will change but they will see things differently and they will be different people because of their studies so I don't know if that really answers your question now but I appreciate it. Yes and it's it's a question for the whole community it's about the identity of AMBS are there any other questions we have time for one more if I don't see one real quick here I'm going to go ahead and ask another question but so my final question to you and then depending on how long it takes you maybe there'll be one more that shows up in the Q&A but is there anything that has really surprised you I'm thinking particularly of um like why is the chaplaincy program the MDiv Connect specifically chaplaincy program like so um attractive right now but maybe you have other things in mind that you'd like to say something about what's surprising you in your role well I'll run with that one for now um um we offer a master of divinity chaplaincy degree we're noticing over the last year or two maybe three there's more students are interested in that degree than say MDiv pastoral ministries now we can probably make some assumptions about that chaplaincy is certainly an excellent way to do ministry for people who are called to ministry it's a difficult ministry and god bless people who are doing it because we need chaplains we also need congregational ministers right so is the perception that congregations are kind of in difficult conversations right now that maybe people don't want to be involved in and so being a chaplain is another great way to be uh ministering and to be a pastor I don't really know the dynamics of that but what I do hear from our denominations MCUSA MC Canada is that we need pastors right congregations need pastors and so I would love if you think about who those next generation of pastors could be and if it takes them 12 years to get to seminary so be it but uh that was it is surprising to see kind of the trends of seminary studies and what they involve and who's interested when maybe in another year or two we'll have a lot of people wanting to do the pastoral ministry track that would be great well and that's a great way to end our time together thank you so much Marianne for answering these questions um I pointed out in the alumni newsletter this week that I'd like you all to join this experiment the five word experiment have you ever considered seminary if you can say that to five people and plant those seeds we don't know what's going to come of that but I tried it a week ago in church I was visiting a church and I said to the person who was worship leader have you ever considered seminary and they said yes and it turned out she didn't know that she could study from her home in another state so do ask people that question have you ever considered seminary name the gifts that you're seeing you know that alumni are the biggest influences of our of the students who come um or pastors those those people who tap people on the shoulder and thanks also for your financial support you'll also read in the alumni newsletter that we have a special alumni voices campaign happening this week and part of next week this is uh part of the end of our uh campaign that we've been going at for over a year now um it's a chance to end this campaign in a really strong way with a lot of alumni participation so send in a story of a um an AMBS uh offering that has happened for you since you left seminary whether that's a pastors and leaders event or a workshop that you did an online course one of the small groups we offer all of those things you can see more about that in the information I sent you and remember to stay connected through um taking these offerings from the church leadership center and also if you want to audit a class at AMBS as a grad you can do that for a great rate just let us know if there's a class that you see that you'd like to be part of um in this this summer term or in the fall next month on May 16 our third thursday conversation will feature david miller who is teaching uh in in journey but in the church leadership center as a whole but particularly he's going to be speaking about journey international the groups of people that we have around the world who are working at the non-degree uh training for pastoral ministry thanks to all of you who joined us today and thanks also to student christian nowe who provided the technical support for this webinar this concludes today's third thursday i hope you have a wonderful weekend bye


Alright, so we're back again. This is now the fourth time that I've tried to get this Instagram live to work. The connection is a bit choppy right now. So if you saw earlier, my name is Catty Genuzzi and I'm going to be interviewing James Todesco. Hopefully the connection works better this time. James is the president of UVM votes, so we have a lot of great questions lined up for him. Just waiting for him to join. There, that's so much better. That's so much better. Alright, awesome. Thank God. I know it's been, I feel like we've just been completely unable to meet. Yeah, that's very fair. Yeah. Alright, well, it's nice to meet you.  Yeah. My name is James Todesco. I'm a junior at the University of Vermont. I was born and raised in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and I am a political science and French double major here. Awesome. That's really cool. I love polycycler classes at UVM. There were some of my favorite ones. So, yeah. Alright, so let's start talking about your political experiences. So when did you become politically active? I know you said that you were born and raised in Vermont, so I'm curious to know. Yeah, my first experience with the political system was in eighth grade. I was a legislative page at our state house, and so I think the legislative page system is where like some 30-odd Vermont students in their eighth grade year work in the state legislature during their spring semester, and you do it for a month and a half, and you go do an entire work week in the state house being a courier for notes and doing like other little secretarial work for the house and the Senate chambers, and then on Mondays, you go to school, you collect your score, you take it with you to the state house, and then in your free time, you finish your work there. And that was an interesting window into the local political process. And from there, in high school, I did debate, which was removed from the concrete experience of local politics or like any political agenda per se, but it was deeply engaged with policy issues. And so in Vermont, you do this thing called public forum where you research a topic for one month and you come to understand it really well, and you debated a couple of times. And in college, that kind of all came together when I had gotten a better understanding about policy research and further enabled by my polycyc classes, and I worked with Rebecca Holcomb's governorial campaign this past summer. She was the former secretary of education in Vermont, and I think a very compassionate leader. One by a landslide, but it was a pleasure to phone bank and do campaign finance for her. And then ultimately following my interning with her campaign, I founded a group called UVM votes. And it was in founding that group that we really got to like dig into the specific issue of student voting rights, which once you find like a nice niche, and that can become your niche, I feel like that's that's pretty satisfying and was a very new experience for me. So it's been it's been a real adventure. And I've been doing that since this past, really intensely since this past fall, though we did begin doing like a little bit of stuff in the spring before COVID. Wow. So you really kind of got started when you were in eighth grade, which is crazy to think you were like 12 years old. And it was just something that, you know, obviously, you just had a passion for. So it's really interesting to hear about how that's like blossomed into what it has become today and UVM votes. And I'm really curious to know about that. So can you just tell me a little bit about that, what the goals of the club are? Yeah, just I just want I want to hear about it. And how does someone go about joining that if there's, you know, in the future? Yeah, the goals of the goal of UVM votes is primarily centered around this idea of institutionalizing resources. So right before a campaign, what you'll find us and every other like activist organization doing right before an election is there will be lots of tabling. There will be a lot of door knocking and these measures make a lot of sense. They've happened for as long as campaigns have been an option, but they take they take the same amount of intense effort year and year again. And so what you really interested in as a group is how can we make resources a staple of a process which people already traveled. So in the state of Vermont and many other states around the US, there's this thing called voter. It's when you it's when you're registered to vote by registering your car or like going to have your license updated. So when you go to the DMV. Yeah. Despite the incredible alliteration there are like assets. But yeah, and so that makes a lot of sense. It's a pathway people already travel and it's not related to voting, but it helps promote voter registration. And so in the way that states have historically been laboratories for democracy. I also hold that college campuses in the modern day are small laboratories for democracy because we're functionally small municipalities. And we have our own rule systems that encourage or curb certain behaviors. And so that's like the abstract overview of what the group is interested in. In material terms, it looks like things such as integrating voter registration into the my UVM portal or using the registrar's office to tech students once or twice a year to say like hey registered to vote through this link and then link to UVM's turbo vote page, which is a voter registration tool. Or maybe you could have a like you could have UVM declare like a campus holiday for going like out to election day in the same way we have town meeting day off. Right. So basically UVM votes what I'm hearing about it.  But something that I'm just really pulling from it is that the goal is to make voter registration and voting among college students as like accessible as possible. And, you know, with an emphasis on how important it is that you know I've learned this through my other interviews to that I've done for this page that, you know, college student turnout when they're voting is extremely important because we do make up as college students the big part of the community.  So I totally appreciate what UVM votes is doing. So when did you when did you start the club? We originally started as an offshoot of a national organization called every vote counts national, which was that Yale has a very similar mission and organization. But after the spring semester of 2019, like COVID hit things slowed down, and it was in the fall of, oh sorry, spring of 2020, spring of 2019 is a little too far ago. But in the fall of 2020, just barely right before the fall semester began, I just something I was I was fishing in Montana, I was fly fishing. I'm a vegetarian so anecdotally, I just throw the fish back, but and I just got to thinking about UVM and student voter turnout. And I looked into some data that Tufts University organizes through their Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, and it's a service they provide for free to any university that requests it. And what they do is they analyze how much your student body is participating in the voting process and they break it, they can aggregate this or disaggregate it by race, ethnicity, gender, year you are what you age you are. And also, and then in this coming cycle they're going to tell you about in state and out of state. But what it revealed to me once I requested it and encountered it was that UVM students are voting below the national average of college students. So not only do students vote at a substantially lower rate to the tune of 20% below the national average citizen in the US, but then UVM votes below the collegiate national average by three to five points. That's really surprising. Yeah, that's really surprising. So this is actually going directly into that's a really great segue into the next question that I have. How has UVM votes affected voter turnout to your knowledge, among college students. It's, it's one of those tough things it feels like shouting into the void. I, I know we've had a lot of contact with students that much we know in a quantitative fashion in the fall semester, because we didn't have time to step back take a breath, assess what institutional measures could be implemented, because that necessarily takes often more than a year. We were just like running with a relational tax banking strategy and text banking takes your traditional text banking where you text any number you can get a hold of a step further where you text the numbers of the people you already have in your phone. And the thinking behind this is by having a pre existing relationship with people you're more likely to motivate change. Right. We reached out to, I think about 600 UVM students. Wow. But we don't have like a way to know what percent of those students were already registered and how many of them fully followed through on registering. But we've also, we did tabling, which I have learned is not the most effective way to engage with people certainly not during COVID times. So digital fashions of accessing people has been particularly important. And we've also grown our Instagram presence, which we're always still working on, as I think everyone is. So I don't know exactly how much of a difference we materially made. And I think that's also some of why I feel so invested in working on institutional changes, because institutional changes at least you know you've made some concrete advancement. Whereas each cycle when you're trying to register voters and you're not putting the paperwork in their hands, which is increasingly less and less effective. You don't really know if that person followed through all the way and it doesn't seem the best way to deliver them increased accessibility. I'm curious to know how the, how the statistics have changed from what you were saying about, you know, how UVM was below the collegiate average of people who vote. I'm curious to know how that's changed even within the past year.  And I'm curious to know how the statistics will like continue to shift in that over the upcoming years as UVM votes, you know, more students get involved in it and it becomes, you know, a bigger thing on campus. So I think that'll be really interesting. We'll have access to the data for this past general election cycle come June. It's a little later than usually the data is available in May, but because of the extreme number of mail-in ballots, it'll take longer. And I also forgot to mention one of the really effective things that we did last semester was we sent one email out through the Student Government Association. And we used link tracking on that email to see how many clicks through to UVM's voter registration portal happened. We got 170 clicks. And I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that those people who took the initiative to click through to the voter registration portal probably investigated that process through to its end. And for some of those people, it might have been updating their voter registration status. Some of them just want to be extra cautious. Maybe there's, you know, a kind of self-sample bias where people who really care about voting want to like double down on being sure that they're registered. I tell myself optimistically before I go to sleep that we registered some new people through that path. I definitely believe you did, especially, you know, with the recent election, the presidential election. I mean, I was seeing every day on Instagram, you know, at least 10 to 15 to 20 posts, stories, you know, encouraging people to register to vote. And, you know, it was just something that I feel like at a certain point, I mean, I was registered already. But I believe that it definitely encouraged a lot more people to vote that maybe weren't registered before. So I think that you're definitely what's what you're doing is definitely going to bring in some new registration. And yeah, and Peter just said in the chat, he said, thanks for all the work you're doing to increase voter turnout. So I agree with that. I know you know Peter a little bit. All right, so what strategies on election days are you using to ensure that UVM students are voting? Yeah. So other than the fact we're primarily interested in like the super zoomed out multi year approach when it comes down to it when we're looking at those like the day of the election, maybe the three days preceding the election. What did this past semester was we looked at the Tufts analysis, and we found out which majors were voting at the lowest rate. And then we expected by specifically targeting those majors and encouraging them to turn out to vote. We could have the most impact possible. So what we did is we contacted professors in stem who taught stem classes and we said, hey, may we present in front of your class. And so myself and other people on UVM votes team went to those classes. And we just gave like a 60 second talk about voting it like voting rules for college students, which is it's kind of misunderstood but you can vote in the state where you are from, or the 10 school which is a really potent problem for UVM students are an important question because we are an 80% 7380% out of state student population. And then we talked about voting in the upcoming election locally and why that might be an easier path for most students because of how good the voter registration laws in Vermont are. And then finally, we said if you show up, we are tabling in front of the polling place and we have cookies, we have drinks, we have coffee, and we got like, we brought in like, yeah, girls and that's how and then people showed up. I don't know some of them from the stem classes. I don't know specifically how many from the stem classes, but that's where we were. So stem was the major that had the least amount of voter turnout them. I think business majors also had very low voter turnout. It's an interesting question which I'm not sure I've gotten all the way to the bottom of, but because one of the problems for registering college students to vote is the fact that you have cohort turnover right every four years. Yeah, when we look at general election data for which majors are turning out to vote. That's a whole cycle ago. So even though by concrete hard absolute numbers, it might have been a significant data point to look at when we think about who we want like what majors we want to target which what majors we see as particularly low turnout in whatever our current moment is. I think it makes more sense to look back at the most recent election rather than the most recent matching election. So the matching election is like, this was a general we'd look back to 2016. That might not be as meaningful representation as looking back to the 2018 midterms and then seeing in a relative terms who showed up. Anyway, that that was. Is it accurate to assume that political science majors are among the group people who vote the most or have the higher voter turnout. Or do you remember which major. I think education majors turned out at a really high rate. Let's see we can see it at UVM. I have all the links memorized. I think UVM. I'm going to say general election. I'm not hosting it there anymore. Well, I think I remember seeing education majors. I think policy majors were middle of the pack. I was not extraordinarily proud of policy majors at the time. I think they got grouped into humanities. Because Tufts is trying to do a comparative analysis, not only for your school, but for hundreds of universities across the country, they just need to lump some majors together in the categories that can compare. And so I didn't discover a policy category and I suspect we got like either social sciences or humanities and those above average rates, but I think education and maybe like social services probably took the cup. Wow, that's really interesting. All right, so this question is the one that we chatted about briefly before we got started with the interview, but so Burlington's ward eight is notoriously jet gerrymandered gerrymandered. So how does UVM UVM votes impact the word and other words in the city. Yeah, so to recap gerrymandering. Yeah, for folks at home gerrymandering is when you draw district lines with the intention of over representing a particular group. And so historically this has happened in the south to disadvantage black voters and advantage white voters. And it involves making sure that whatever group you're interested in always holds just barely a majority in the district, or it tends to look like just barely holding majority in a district. In Vermont, we've gerrymandered a student district, and we've done it in what I think is not such an a farious way. So what we've done is we've tried to with as as much clarity as possible just make sure students are the only people in this district. It looks like a lot of residential living. And it looks like some of the student housing behind the Waterman building and granted there are some local residents of Vermont who also fell into this category. But the reason why it's an advantageous thing, or it could be argued it's an advantageous thing in our context is because students have a hard time engaging in the political process. That's what this whole conversation is in part because they're new to it in part because they're transient members of the community. So it's hard for them to create organizing coalitions and generate political force with that. And so that's why it might be argued as advantageous. How does UVM votes impact that? Well, we focus on we focus on interacting exclusively with students were interested in improving the voter experience of students at UVM. And so our our goal is to increase turnout there. What we saw in the last mayoral election, which might be a good finger on the pulse of local student turnout in those in that gerrymandered student district Ward 8 is we saw only 20% turnout. Like maybe 22% 20% and that in the context of the other wards in Burlington. I think there are eight words total. Yeah, put it at like 45 to 50, 55%. And so we are we are still way below the mark. Yeah. Wow, that's that's really interesting. And I know we got some some love on that question and like the comments and then the hearts on the side. So I think that that's that question was something I didn't I didn't come up with this question someone else on my team did. And I thought that was a really, really interesting, really interesting question again something that I said in one of the introductions of the this live that I tried to start so many times that we have some really good questions, especially some that, you know, we might not immediately about, you know, as students who are unaware of this, you know, this issue. So, you know, I recently learned about it.  All right, the next question sorry I'm reading off of my laptop right now just so I don't miss any of them because they have a bunch of good ones. So SGA elections are run on strict budgets for each candidate. What problems would arise if candidates could spend an unlimited amount of money on their campaign. Oh, and I wanted to know when you're curious about this question are you curious about SGA candidates who could spend unlimited amount or like actual like general election. Yeah. So, let's, let's talk about SGA candidates. Okay. Yeah. I thought this was such a fun question, or at least an interesting one given a million dollars like what would you do with it kind of. Yeah, I was thinking the SGA is unlikely to attract super PACs, which are big donating coalitions, such as we find in our current political system. But the consequences I think we discover if we afforded SGA candidates to run without budget caps is we we'd see some resemblance of what we see in our current political system, which is most of the time, even if there are some exceptions to the rule, there would still be the rule where most of the time we see the most advantaged and affluent students rise to the top because they can leverage intense social media campaigns. Social media campaigns, although they can be driven by followerships, they can also be driven by sponsored posts. And they can also be driven by dropping like geo filters over locations through services like Snapchat or Instagram and you pay for those. Usually, and that that would create a system where not only does it mean those candidates are unresponsive to the general student body, but it also means that in an additional harm, maybe related to that one, definitely related to that one, you see the needs of less advantaged students ever represented. So you see it taken in a direction that maybe has like maybe funding for the from the SGA suddenly starts going to more superficial elements of our university. Whereas there might be like a big need for like redoing one of the residence halls. But and on campus like every year of their time at UVM, they're a senior, they know the residence halls are bad. But someone who lives off campus because they have the money to live off campus and they have the money to pay for a political campaign through the SGA is really detached from that problem. Yeah. No, it's it's and we see this also in which is why I know you asked, you know, are we talking SGA or are we talking, you know, real world kind of politics like that because that's this is definitely something that's been seen and, you know, other campaigns for politicians that, you know, when they have, you know, an insane amount of money to spend on their campaigns, it really detaches the candidate from the from the voters and, you know, the people that they're attempting to represent in any way. So, yeah. So, how can the importance of voting be integrated in UVM fall curriculum. In your opinion. Yeah. Really great question to this is a great question. And I really like the focus on making things integrated versus additive. I think, I think additive is like someone gives a talk once in your class for 60 seconds. Right. And I don't want to totally diminish that because I think that's like I don't want to say, I want to acknowledge that some movement forward is better than no movement forward and sometimes it looks like additive. But if an integrative approach to me, for example, would look like having your professors on more than one occasion, probably three occasions, bring up registering to vote in the fall, not all at once, but over a period of time. And that period of time is so important because you don't bludgeon students with the same information again and again, make it turn that information into small consumable steps. So say like, the first thing is like, think about, do you know what state you want to vote in? That has nothing to do with the logistics that just has to do with what you believe. Where do you care about voting? If it's here, if it's somewhere else, okay, now you know. The next time professor talks to you maybe a week later, say, investigate steps registered to vote in that place. And then the third step might be like another week later, and it could be like, has anyone had problems and maybe do a little bit of troubleshooting. It might not be a fair burden to salad professors with, but if you can get students to consider whether they've had trouble, then that professor can redirect maybe to an organization like UVM votes, maybe to an organization like our Office of Civic Engagement, which has recently really begun to take on a flavor for civic activism in the voting political sense. So that's a favorite idea of mine. It's important though that we can't like rush to believing that professors can say like, oh, you get extra credit or maybe you won't pass my class if you don't register to vote because that, my friends, is a felony. Yeah. No one's interested in that. So you can't have an exchange of goods or services and a grade would be like a sort of service. And you can't withhold or provide goods or services on account of someone's registering to vote or in fact voting, but you can certainly carve pathways for people to travel more easily. That's definitely my favorite one. Yeah, I also think that it's really important to, you know, instead of obviously, obviously, including adding, you know, resources to register to vote also educating students on, you know, their right to vote in a state that they might not you know, that they might not live in like they just go to school and because I know that a lot of UVM students don't vote because they don't realize that they can. And so I think that having that force of, you know, some education within classes would definitely help, you know, bring up some voter turnout and that would also be, you know, an easy thing to include within fall curriculum. It's just reminding of their, of their right to vote in the state. The residency of students is such an interesting constitutional question. And for anyone interested in investigating this further, you can find really intriguing parallels to soldiers as voters because soldiers often have this transient residential status and they can't often meet a durational requirement. The soldier situation is very easy to imagine. You can imagine you turn 18, you immediately enlist in the army, and you move out of your hometown, but you're not living in any of the places you're stationed. And say like every move to a new place, why should you be expected to vote in the last place you had some like planted address. So that's kind of something is on my mind. Yeah, that's a really, that's really interesting. And again, the other things that, you know, in myself, I haven't given much thought to so being able to discuss this and learn about it and talk about it is very valuable. So that's, that's really cool. So how important is the role of social media in regards to voter turnout at UVM and does social media play a big role in UVM votes as mission. I think social media plays a big part. I don't know if it, I wish UVM votes could leverage social media with some more strength. But I think when you see your peers posting about voting, I think that's a really powerful signaling mechanism. I think when really popular Instagram pages on the student community post about voting, even if that is in no way their central cause. I think that's really powerful because you can kind of, you can briefly leverage that audience which otherwise was not like intending to receive it. And I think that's really meaningful and kind of explores an opportunity to collaborate like collaboration collaborations don't need to be lengthy or really energy consuming to still be valuable. And so that's what I think it looks like in the general UVM community. What it the kind of role it plays for UVM votes, I would say is a little bit of a smaller role. And we actually just switched from a social media chair to an engagement chair for reasons that have to do with the broadness of the vision. So I think it makes sense to have someone who actually specializes in content curation. That's like understanding how design tools work. That's understanding how social media platforms work because you engage audiences differently based on the mode of communication. So we switched from a social media chair to an engagement chair to kind of have a more broader focus on what recruitment looks like and what engagement looks like outside of social media, right, because there, you can also talk to clubs, you can talk to fraternities and sororities. You can go through social media. So for us, it's on the radar, but it's not like at the forefront of what we do. I like that you changed the social media chair to the engagement chair and what you said is really accurate about, instead of just going through social media as your main source of trying to gain some engagement, going through other clubs and having other even social media accounts.  And, you know, just something like that, like bring, bring more awareness to, you know, a completely different demographic of people that might not have, you know, voter turnout and registration on like the forefront of their mind is, yeah, it's important. And it's really interesting that you brought that up. Like thinking about these windows for collaboration with other groups on campus has been something I really started taking more seriously in the second half of this semester. And I've been toying with the idea of what it would mean to have a voting summit once a year where like any interested club or affinity group on campus would get together. And we just have like a meeting of minds about what it could look like to improve the condition of voting on campus, what people are looking for, even if they feel like they don't have the time or energy to contribute. And then maybe what clubs feel like they do have some time or energy to contribute. I think that kind of like touch point once a year would make a lot of sense and help make this dialogue rather than a once off. Yeah, that would do a lot for the community, honestly. I think that'd be a really good idea. So, excuse me, I'm going to sneeze. Oh my gosh, I have bad allergies right now. There's nothing worse than anticipating this needs. Yep. Alright, so our second to last question is, are you familiar with town meeting TV. I was not formerly familiar with town meeting TV, but I looked at a friend of mine looked up with me. He said, Oh, I get it. They're the c span of local television, which I feel like are high marks. Yeah, yeah, town meeting TV has become something that you know I didn't even know about until I started working on this project. And, you know, they've done a lot and we're, you know, our project right now we're focusing on making the content more accessible and interesting for a college demographic. So, our demographic was or CCTVs demographic was, you know, much less about college students at the beginning of it.  So we're taking content actually the post that we just posted. Peter worked on it. And it's all about, you know, we're taking content from the YouTube channel and posting it on the Instagram to just keep the content as easily accessible for a large group of people as possible. So, it's a really cool project that we're working on. And I'm grateful to be able to, you know, expand my knowledge on so many different issues that are going on locally. I like it a lot because you and I are just both at different ends of the same frontier, which is finding ways to lower barriers to access for information. It was just about the information cost to knowing how to participate in your local community. Definitely. Yeah. All right. Last question is, in your opinion, why is it important for college students to be politically active in the town that they live in at the moment? Yeah, I think it's important for a few reasons. The first of these is that, especially here in Vermont, this is just a logistical point. It's very easy. We have same day voter registration. And you can, it's not just same day voter registration. Once you're at the polls, you can do it from a computer. You can do it from your phone. You do it online. And it's only a few steps and there's not very much information required, which means getting set up to have the infrastructure to vote here is very simple. The second reason is ideological. It has to do with like how we receive information and receive feedback. And it's that when you participate in local politics, it's a lot easier to see in at least some fashion what impact your vote has had. If you vote in an election back in your home state, maybe you can do like the electoral calculus and maybe that had a more like a broader impact based on your electoral power, but I don't know if that's the best way to build habits. If you're having trouble being like, ah, where should I vote? I'm not really sure. Just settle for the place you are. It's not even settling because you get to understand in a more material way when something, when a town initiative happens, you somehow play a role in that. And then the final reason I would say has to do with the fact that it's something you can talk about with your friends. So it becomes social. It becomes something where you all have a common denominator that otherwise would have been inaccessible unless you happen to have like a friend from whichever state you hail from, like Wyoming. Maybe like 50 UVM students come from Wyoming. So if you're from there, you, you might be interested in if you want to have a social conversation about politics. Yeah, politics. It might make sense to vote here. Definitely. Yeah, I really like that that it becomes a social thing, you know, it becomes something that you can talk about with your peers and, you know, brings a greater connection to the community that, you know, we live in at the moment, which is really important. Yeah, definitely. Well, I really appreciate you sitting and talking with me. The conversation that we just had was phenomenal. And I'm so grateful that made this work finally because it's taken us a little while. So that's not meant you pulled us through. That's it. No, you I really, you really, yeah, you really pulled through and, you know, your answers to these questions were amazing. And we're all very grateful. Everyone here at my on my team, especially and our followers are very grateful that, you know, we got to talk like this. It was easy to get questions. So thank you to the team. Thank you so much. And good luck with everything that you are continuing to do. Good luck with the rest of school and bringing UVM votes, you know, to the forefront of everyone's mind. So thank you. Thank you very much. Good luck with the rest of your work as well. Thank you.