So tonight we're at the Farmington Country Club in Charlottesville,
Virginia, over the mountain from Harrisonburg at an event hosted 
by Leslie and Richard Gilliam. Leslie, of course is a stalwart 
member of our Board of Visitors and the chair of our Development 
Committee as well. Even in the rain and the cold we had a great 
turnout and a wonderful conversation. We heard the importance 
of that faculty student relationship and how that there's nothing 
that can really replace that. And people talked about the 
importance of faculty who really care about teaching and who 
want to engage with students especially with undergraduates 
and when somebody made that point tonight, there was, 
actually, a round of applause which indicated that a lot of 
other people tonight felt the same way about JMU's faculty. We 
heard from an alum who is getting really to move overseas and 
said " I want to stay connected with JMU but I'm not quite sure how 
to do it." and we talked about that. We talked about the fact that JMU 
faculty and students are now traveling all over the world and we 
want to connect him with JMU faculty or students who might be 
coming to a program or an institution near him and our office 
of International Programs can help to facilitate those 
interactions. It's great for our students and our faculty as they go 
abroad and it's great for our alumni if we can create that JMU 
sense of family far away from home. We also heard from a 
nursing faculty member tonight who is preparing to take a group 
of students to Kenya to provide basic healthcare and training in 
Kenya. What a great, life-changing opportunity that's going to be 
not just for our students but for the lives that they're going to touch 
over in Kenya. So we're very excited when we hear examples 
like that. And again, it was the initiative of an individual faculty 
member that's getting that program off the ground. So those 
international experiences are important, we're trying to facilitate 
those wherever and however we can, and it's happening in every 
discipline and every college across the campus.     
