It's great to be here tonight, 
we're in center city, Philadelphia 
at the Courtyard Marriot, by the way,
where the general manager is a JMU alum, 
so it's a historic venue, a beautiful setting, 
and it's been such a treat to be here 
and have a special JMU connection. 
By the way, the football team and 
the soccer team are both here as well tonight, 
for competitions in this area. 
What's been fun here, is here we are, far away, 
several hours from JMU, but people are reconnecting, 
and they've talked about how they long 
to do that and given us a lot of ideas about 
how to do that. It was a great question that 
came up about, well, what is the quality of 
our database and yes we may have 
lists of alumni and hopefuily at least know 
where they live, but one of the key pieces of 
information is what are they doing with 
their lives and with their careers. 
The more we know about where alumni 
are working and the possibilities, 
whether they could hire students, 
as new graduates or be mentors or even 
do informational interviews in the fields 
that they are in, there are so many ways 
that information is valuable to us, 
and the different academic programs. 
One of the other things we heard tonight 
is that people, when they wanna connect to JMU, 
also connect through their disciplines 
or fields of study. Whether it's the hospitality program, 
whether its communications or some other field, 
that people are sometimes looking for 
those types of very specific connections 
with their programs back at JMU 
or with recent graduates or students who are 
in those programs today, so getting that 
business information, helping us to know, 
oh we have great alumni in Philadelphia 
in all these different fields, let's find ways 
to connect with them, get them back on to campus
 or bring the campus to them,
 get our students connected to them.
Those are the connections we need to be making together. 
