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Hi, my name is Jonathan Lubin and I am from the American University class of 2015 from the SPA building, a memory that I remember, and it's a major student organization that affected me was the Graduate Leadership Council.

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I was the president of it from 2014 to 2015, and I didn't know anything about it until I got nominated in and said, sure, I'll do it. And I was really excited.

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And it brought a lot of really great insights and a lot of really cool experiences. Um, as a student here at American University, I got to go to board of trustee meetings where I got to interact with all the trustees and

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Neil Kerwin. Um, and one of the memories I actually had of some of the crazy things we did was, I remember it was the winter, I'm going to say, the winter of 2014.

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It was a massive snowstorm. And the trustees said, hey, don't come to the trustee meeting. You don't need to go.

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It's snowing and all the lines are closed. You can't go to it. And I remember talking to my vice president and going, no, we're going to go in the snow.

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The undergrads can't show us up. We need to show that we as graduate students are just as dedicated. You know, they're on the dorm rooms.

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We got to go there. And I remember because I live about two miles away, I walked two miles uphill from another part of Tenleytown in the snow that was up to my my thigh.

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And it was a really, really interesting moment because when we opened that door, all the trustees were bewildered to see, here's these two grad students had no reason to be there. Show up, and we're like, yeah, we're here for the meeting.

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We're going to do it. And I had a really great conversation with Neil Kerwin that day where he was, I think he had a little bit of respect for us grad students from there, and we had a

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really great relationship with them and the trustees for that. And we did a lot of really great things. We brought a lot of good speakers on here. We did a great cruise event for our grad students.

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And again, it really helped me grow, at least in more of a social space and really made me like American University a lot and all the things it had to offer. And the professors here, the

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faculty here, everyone has been so great, and especially in my field of public administration, the spa school really helped to mold me to who I am. And now I'm a professor at Georgia

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Southern University, and I'm taking a lot of the lessons I learned here at American, um, to heart. And those values of really caring about your students and really checking in on them and seeing what they're doing and knowing

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everyone by name, almost, um, it really creates a difference. And you see that with students who are really trying to understand why the field is good. And American University helped

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mold and shape me in that way, too. And I appreciate all the two years I had here from 2013 to 2015. So it was a great moment. But I will never forget the

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Graduate Leadership Council and all the stuff that faculty have done here.