After many years of being a professor and administrator, I find nothing to be more rewarding than spending time with students. This week, I had several great opportunities to interact with students in my office and around campus. A couple of students had personal challenges that they wanted to bring to my attention, and several of the students wanted to talk about ideas they have for campus improvement. One group of these students is in our first-year experience course, and another group is from our Tech Leadership Council class. These teams of students represented different disciplines and different parts of the country, but were clearly bonded through their time spent together in these class experiences. I even got to attend a class this week – a wonderful experience with Professors Nick Bustamante (art), Jamie Newman (biology) and Mary Caldorera-Moore (biomed engineering.) This collaborative, interdisciplinary course uses digital art to enable the students to create scientific illustrations, representing what we call an “unparalleled educational experience.” Nick, Jamie and Mary have offered this course for the past two years, and are getting a lot of interest from students and others who see this as an inspiring experience and a possible career option. And they are getting to learn about biology in a very special way. These students shared personal experiences that inspired the art they were developing. I also made a couple of trips to CenturyLink this week. The second trip was for a press conference in which representatives from CenturyLink, the Cyber Innovation Center, and local schools were rolling out an exciting new STEM curriculum. This was an important announcement of the commitment made by CenturyLink and the community that will elevate the education and future opportunities for students throughout the region. The new curriculum developed by the Cyber Innovation Center, and being deployed across the country, had its origins in the integrated engineering curriculum developed by Tech’s faculty. I saw today’s announcement to be a strong symbol of I-20 corridor partners collaborating to create a greater future for our region and state. Hopefully, there will be many more similar announcements of impactful I-20 partnerships in the future. I hope you enjoy a few of my favorite pics for the week: