Episode 19: Festival of Excellence, Part 1

Recorded live at the annual Festival of Excellence at SUU, President Scott Wyatt and Steve Meredith talk with the Distinguished Student Project Winners. Due to the length, the podcast has been split into two parts.

Full Transcript

 

Steve Meredith: Hello again, everyone, and welcome to Solutions for Higher Education, a podcast featuring Scott L Wyatt, the president of Southern Utah University. I’m Steve Meredith, your host, and with me today as always is President Wyatt. Good afternoon, Scott.

Scott Wyatt: Good afternoon, Steve. It’s a nice day.

Meredith: It’s a beautiful day, and this is a particularly interesting podcast because it’s live, and to prove that to us, audience, will you signify your presence here by applauding or whistling or doing something? [Audience applauds] Yeah, this is our first live podcast, and we’re doing that because we are here at the Festival of Excellence, an annual celebration of faculty and student research. And a lot of this comes down, Scott, doesn’t it, to SUU’s commitment to experiential education? A lot of these student projects are what we call their EDGE projects, and it’s something that every SUU student does prior to graduation. Do you want to talk just a little bit about that and then we’ll introduce the students?

Wyatt: Yeah, so what we find is, is that most students can get through kindergarten through high school without ever having to have to do anything other than respond. Read and respond, memorize, answer the test question…and what we’re trying to do is create an environment where students go to the unscripted questions. Where a student’s responsibility is to invent knowledge or to discover things or to go off script, to figure it out themselves. And this is really an interesting day with the Festival of Excellence because we have about 400 student presentations. And when you consider that we’ve got just over 10,000 students at SUU and about, maybe close to 8,000 on-campus, and of the 400 presentations, several of them—many of them—have two, three, four, five, or six students working together, we find ourselves with more than a thousand students participating in undergraduate research.

Meredith: Wow.

Wyatt: This is really pretty big for us.

Meredith: And that nearly thousand kids…

Wyatt: Probably more than a thousand.

Meredith: Yeah, represent some of our best and brightest. But today, we’re going to feature some of the absolute best and absolute brightest. These students that we’re interesting as part of the podcast today are what we call “Distinguished Student Project Award Winners”, and so they’ve been specially identified as part of the Festival of Excellence, and you’ve got one sitting just to your right.

Wyatt: That’s right. And in order to give justice to each of these students and their research topics, we would have to spend a very long time, because we have a good collection—a total of 14. So part of this, Steve, is going to be helping just reveal the personalities and some of the most interesting pieces of this instead of depth. So, Parker Hess, welcome.

Parker Hess: Hi!

Wyatt: Parker, you’re majoring in what?

Hess: Theater, arts, and dance.

Wyatt: And you are done?

Hess: Oh yeah.

Wyatt: This semester?

Hess: Uh-huh. I’m out of here. [Laughter]

Meredith: You said that as though you are not only done, but you are finished. [All laugh]

Wyatt: Yeah, but it has been a blast watching you perform.

Hess: Thank you. I’m glad you come to all of the stuff that we do.

Wyatt: So, your topic is Atlas.

Hess: Yes.

Wyatt: What is something really interesting about that?

Hess: I think the most interesting part was trying to capture the theme of human connection with time and duration and that process that I had to start over six different times. [Laughter]

Wyatt: Studying time six times?

Hess: It sounds like a math problem.

Wyatt: It kind of does. That’s pretty good for a dance major. [All laugh] So tell us what you discovered? What was most interesting?

Hess: I think the most interesting thing was that in the time limit that I kind of set for myself of about five and a half minutes of how to effectively capture human connection, and highlighting that without that being this over-dramatized “Oh, they’re together and then they’re pulled apart again.” Something that’s more platonic, but still acknowledging that it’s a part of life, and it is sad, but also happy at the same time.

Wyatt: Define for us Atlas?

Hess: I chose Atlas because I really wanted to focus on this relationship between people—not just two people, but as a group—but I didn’t want it to be super pedestrian in style. So when I tried to title it, I was like, “I don’t want to call it ‘Planet Earth’ or ‘City’ or ‘Town’ or ‘People Connecting.’” I wanted to use some synonym term that sounded cool and broad, and so I kind of thought of it like the Titans, and then I thought, “Ooh, an Atlas.” Like the atlas, a book, because it is a picture of the world and we’re all of that world. And then in the costuming, I used brown and blue in the costumes with a grey base and that kind of really drew me to this idea of Atlas, because it kind of sounds like very powerful and dominant, but also really relatable because I think we all know what an atlas is these days, right? OK, cool.

Wyatt: I have a pile of them at home.

Hess: Good, good.

Wyatt: Yeah. Any surprises for you?

Hess: Yeah, because I thought to do this, I was going to be fast. I thought it was going to be a very fast piece, but it turns out it was being very slow, so I had to use duration as a huge tool to really get what I wanted, and I didn’t see that coming.

Wyatt: Very cool. If you could do it over, what would you do different?

Hess: I think I would add a little bit of characterization to each of the dancers. There were a few that their own highlighted technique, but I don’t think I gave that to everybody, so some people were a little drowned out when some stood out a little bit more. And I don’t want to give specific characters, but characteristics that made them feel more individuals as a whole instead of just like three out of five, if that makes sense.

Wyatt: Yeah. So how did you present your…?

Hess: I stood in front of everybody, I was like, “This is my piece,” they danced, I sat down, and I was like, “What questions do you have for me?” Because art is a very vague and difficult topic to tackle, so people asked some questions and I either had answers or I didn’t, but it was kind of a cool dialogue that we were able to facilitate as an audience and a presenter.

Wyatt: So dance and a discussion?

Hess: Mhmm. D and D.

Wyatt: D and D. OK, thank you so much Parker.

Hess: Thank you

Meredith: Thanks, Parker.

Wyatt: OK, Tessa Brunnenmeyer.

Tessa Brunnenmeyer: Hello!

Wyatt: So, your topic is…tell us what your topic is?

Brunnenmeyer: So I call it “Suspicious Patterning.” I talk about Margaret Cavendish who was a 17th century philosopher and she talks about the way that we interact with the world and gain knowledge about the world, and she’s hesitant about anything that mediates our perception between…of objects. And she says that we should avoid that mediated perception, and her examples are things like telescopes, microscopes, and I make an analogy to visual arts and say that if we’re not trusting telescopes and microscopes—and microscopes as means for acquiring knowledge about the world—we also ought not try to acquire knowledge through the visual arts. 

Wyatt: OK, so what’s your major?

Brunnenmeyer: I’m double majoring in philosophy and art history.

Wyatt: Philosophy and art history?

Brunnenmeyer: Yes.

Wyatt: Very fun.

Brunnenmeyer: Yeah, it’s a fun little intersection.

Wyatt: So we had a little conversation about your presentation earlier today, and I notice you’re wearing something that has bunnies all over it.

Brunnenmeyer: Yes.

Wyatt: Is that because you like bunnies? Or is there some deeper meaning to that?

Brunnenmeyer: I do like bunnies. Unfortunately I discovered a couple of years ago that I am also allergic to bunnies, so that doesn’t work out that well for me. [Laughter] But the bunny shirt was kind of—it’s got just teeny-tiny little bunnies all over it—and it was kind of a nod to Cavendish. She was a contemporary of René Descartes, who is a more popular early modern philosopher, and Descartes did not believe that animals had souls, so he didn’t think that they could feel things or have like perceptions, and Cavendish thinks that everything has basically a soul. Everything is material and everything is intelligent, so she, in addition to being a philosopher, was a poet and a literary figure. And so she wrote a poem directly responding to Descartes called “The Hunting of the Hare,” which is a poem about being chased by a hunter and how scared and stressed he gets, and it’s intended to make the reader empathize with this bunny, and it’s kind of like, “Take that Descartes, of course bunnies have souls.” [All laugh]

Meredith: Throwing shade at Descartes.

Brunnenmeyer: Yeah, throwing a little bit of shade. So I just thought it was funny and I didn’t talk about that in my presentation, but it was a little personal anecdote in my head.

Wyatt: So thinking about this, it would be kind of fun to be back in the 1600s and reading René Descartes and then she comes up with this kind of slap back at him.

Brunnenmeyer: Yeah, it’s a fun little case study in the philosophical discourse that we’re always kind of bouncing back and forth and talking to each other.

Wyatt: Interesting that people didn’t’ always agree, even back then.

Brunnenmeyer: I think that’s a pretty common human experience. [All laugh]

Wyatt: So, what was the most surprising or interesting thing about what you studied?

Brunnenmeyer: There were a lot of things, and I think one of the cool things about philosophy is that this project isn’t really over. I can keep working on it for as long as I want to. But I think finding those intersections between philosophy and art is really exciting. And so I had been really excited about Cavendish, but then I noticed that she was doing natural philosophy, or what we would call science, in like the height of the Baroque period of art history. But there wasn’t a lot of popular aesthetic theory going on, and so I thought it was interesting to say, “Well what should these philosophers—if they remain true to their accounts—say about the visual arts and say about other artistic forms of expression.” So I think just finding that intersection was really interesting.

Wyatt: That’s fun.

Brunnenmeyer: Yeah, it was really exciting.

Wyatt: OK, so how would she, Cavendish, rank in your top three or four list of philosophers?

Brunnenmeyer: I mean, she’s definitely up there. I don’t know if I could rank my favorites, but she…I think she’s awesome for several reasons. One, just that she’s doing philosophy in the 17th century and she’s a woman. She also was just really eccentric, and her nickname in society was Mad Madge, and people just thought she was a little off, but she embraced that and you can still go to castles—she was a duchess—you can go to castles that she lived in and they’re really eclectically decorated and so I think just her as a figure in general I find really interesting and inspiring as a philosopher.

Wyatt: So where is this going to take you? Poems?

Brunnenmeyer: Hopefully to a Ph.D. program. [Laughs] But I mean, I think it’s cool to have a vast experience with philosophy, so I’m hoping that it will help me in some avenue that I pursue. 

Wyatt: I know somebody else that has a philosophy degree.

Brunnenmeyer: Yeah, I think I’ve met him before. [All laugh]

Wyatt: [To audience] That would be me. [All laugh] Thank you very much, Tessa.

Brunnenmeyer: Thank you, President Wyatt.

Wyatt: OK, Billy, welcome. Why don’t you introduce yourself to us?

Billy Clouse: Hi, I’m Billy Clouse, I’m a sophomore here at SUU studying graphic design and I’m the current editor-in-chief of Thunderground. It’s an independent student media organization on campus.

Wyatt: One of those subversive things? [Laugher]

Clouse: Yeah, I guess. [All laugh]

Wyatt: So, how did you get into this?

Clouse: When I was in high school, I was involved in the journalism program and it was nothing too special, just learning how to write features, how to do general news, and I fell in love with it so I wanted to continue it when I came to SUU. So I applied for a position at the school newspaper and I was hired as the only freshman on staff and five weeks into the job, I became the editor-in-chief of the university journal. We did some cool stuff with kind of changing around what we were doing in the newspaper, adding a magazine section, getting a new website, and I eventually decided to resign from that position to start my own thing.

Wyatt: And how did that happen?

Clouse: As in why I resigned?

Wyatt: No, tell me how you ended up coming to the interest of resigning from a fairly prestigious spot into something that was more entrepreneurial.

Clouse: One of the main reasons was kind of the change in leadership of the journal. They were switching operations managers and I felt like my interests and goals aligned more with the previous person. We faced a couple of issues with attempts at censorship last year of, mainly with our opinions section, and the new administration over the journal didn’t seem to value us having the right to decide what we were willing to publish as much. So I decided—between that and them not wanting to keep the newspaper which I thought was essential to the journal—I decided that I would rather put my time into something else. So I decided to resign first and then found out about Thunderground and created it kind of after the fact.

Wyatt: So that’s really fun. That’s pretty bold for a young student.

Clouse: Thank you.

Wyatt: Which you were.

Clouse: Mhmm.

Wyatt: So tell me what’s been the most interesting piece about this for you?

Clouse: For me, the most interesting thing has been our digital publications. We’ve done five. In the fall, we did them every month and then we just released one yesterday that was 128 pages. And it kind of started out as print publications that we uploaded online, and I used a platform called Issue, you can upload publications to it and it has all of these digital tie-ins, so the reason I’ve been doing a lot of things where I hyperlink people to things outside of the magazine, I can embed videos direction into it, and just kind of playing around with digital publications vs. print publications which you normally don’t do a whole lot of as a graphic design student.

Wyatt: Tell us—what has been the most interesting project that you’ve done running this Thunderground?

Clouse: To me, the most interesting project that we did was for our October addition, the magazine came out a few days before National Coming Out Day, so I talked to a couple of students, including Parker who we just talked to earlier, and we kind of talked about their coming out stories. And at the same time, I was in the process of coming out in my own life, so although that wasn’t in the magazine, we ended up putting that online and sharing a very honest opinion of the ups and downs of discovering who you are and coming out to the world. And there was a lot of response from people who said that it kind of gave them hope, and that it was nice to see that other people were going through what they were going through, so that me was kind of a nice personal thing. Just kind of show people that they’re not alone.

Wyatt: And what was the main part of your presentation today?

Clouse: The main part was just talking about over the summer, I had absolutely nothing and just kind of talking about how I planned out the magazines, the website, social media and kept kind of building it and making it interesting. So just kind of that whole process of going from nothing and creating it.

Wyatt: So, you and I haven’t talked about the name of this, but I’m making an assumption. Thunderground—from Thunderbird, which is our mascot, and underground. Right? So it’s kind of a underground newspaper that’s got kind of a nod to the school anyway?

Clouse: Uh-huh. It’s actually based on the original Thunderground at SUU in the early 1990s. It was a couple of students who worked at the newspaper weren’t able to publish some of their opinion pieces so they did this anonymous thing and they kind of kept it underground, didn’t let anyone know who they were. And kind of since then, it’s had a couple of different renditions of people publishing their opinion pieces on campus. And the one that I did is the first time that it’s ever been digital. So just kind of keeping with the original idea of it but kind of expanding on it.

Wyatt: Very fun. Well, any real university has to have free expression.

Clouse: Mhmm.

Wyatt: And opportunities for all the voices, and thanks for being a part of that. Thanks for your presentation today as part of the Festival of Excellence.

Clouse: Thanks for having me.

Wyatt: Terrific. Hanna Dawson.

Hanna Dawson: Hi.

Wyatt: How are you?

Dawson: I’m great, how are you?

Wyatt: Terrific. So Dystopia and Utopia?

Dawson: Yes. Two of my favorite words.

Wyatt: Why don’t you tell us your major?

Dawson: So I am a history major at SUU and I am a double minor in French and biology.

Wyatt: That’s a good collection.

Dawson: I have been collecting for a while now. [All laugh]

Wyatt: Every time you change your major, you just keep it and just add a new one.

Dawson: Yes. [Laughs}

Wyatt: Well, that’s fun. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your presentation for today?

Dawson: So my presentation is about two books. It’s called The Handmaid’s Tale, which is a Dystopian novel and Her Land which is a Utopian novel. They both represent a lot of gender norms and roles that were happening within the time that they were published, and I basically did a compare and contrast between the two. It’s just a literary critical analysis.

Wyatt: They’re kind of opposites?

Dawson: Yeah, so it’s very dichotomous, which is why I found it so interesting to be able to write a paper comparing the two.

Wyatt: As you were doing your research, what struck you as being the most interesting for students at SUU? For you or others your age?

Dawson: What I found the most interesting is how similar they were but in the most different ways. They touched on a lot of the same topics, but they did it drastically different. And so, like I said, it is like a dichotomy that was happening. They would talk about names, clothes, different roles that women had within society, but it was completely opposite within each other, so it was very fascinating.

Wyatt: One person’s heaven is another person’s hell, right?

Dawson: Right.

Wyatt: So, give us kind of a really neat way of comparing these two together.

Dawson: So, Her Land, it’s more egalitarian and it’s an all women society and they are very welcoming to the men who do come—it’s narrated by three men. And so The Handmaid’s Tale is a very patriarchal and stratified society and Her Land was the complete opposite of that, hence the dichotomy and more egalitarian. The women are welcoming to the men, but in The Handmaid’s Tale, men have complete superiority over women and there are very strict rules and there’s not much wiggle room for those rules. So…

Wyatt: Yeah. What’s your favorite part of this kind of study? Not necessarily these books in particular, but what’s your favorite thing about studying this literature and contrasting them together?

Dawson: I think it’s how applicable it is to today’s society. And not only today’s society but to the past as well. Her Land was published in 1915 which was the year that women’s suffrage was granted, and so although both of these books are fiction, there’s a lot of factual information that comes from the novels.

Wyatt: Very good, thank you so much. And what are your long-term plans?

Dawson: Well, I once told you that I liked to collect majors [All laugh] so who knows where I’ll end up, but all I know is that I’m very ambitious, I’ll end up somewhere.

Wyatt: So just as long as we don’t see you here in 12 years with 17 minors and 16 majors. [All laugh]

Dawson: I mean, don’t underestimate my abilities. [All laugh]

Wyatt: That’s not a bad thing. Well, thank you very much.

Dawson: Thank you so much.

Wyatt: What is the very best Dystopia or Utopia book that you’ve ever read?

Dawson: 1984 by George Orwell.

Wyatt: 1984? So that’s the one we should go home and read?            

Dawson: Everybody needs to read that right now, please. [Laughs]

Wyatt: So Dr. Meredith and I are old enough that we could have read it before 1984, which changes the way you look at it just a little bit. Anyway, thank you so much.

Dawson: Thank you so much.

Meredith: Thanks, Hanna.

Wyatt: OK, Jessica.

Jessica Mancuso: Hello!

Wyatt: Welcome!

Mancuso: Thank you.

Wyatt: Jessica Mancuso. So, tell us just a little teeny bit about yourself.

Mancuso: So I’m an economics major here at SUU. I’m an international student. In fact, I’m Italian—a real Italian, so I speak Italian. [Laughs]

Wyatt: Can we just shift over and do the rest of your interview in Italian?

Mancuso: Oh yeah. [Laughs]

Wyatt: …Let’s just keep it in English. [All laugh]

Meredith: I think she’s waiting for you to say something in Italian.

Wyatt: [Laughter] Alright, so, econ major from Italy.

Mancuso: Yeah.

Wyatt: One of, what we’ve got about 6% of our student body are international students and come from, I believe, 56 different countries. Has it been good being here with students from all around the world?

Mancuso: Yeah, I love it. There are people from everywhere and it’s super cool.

Wyatt: Good, I’m glad you’re liking it, because we enjoyed visiting Italy when we were there recently. [Laughs] OK, so tell us about your research.

Mancuso: So, for one of my economic classes, I did some research on gender pay gaps, specifically among faculty members at SUU. I thought this would be interesting because we all talk about gender pay gap and so I wanted to see how the U.S. is doing and then how Utah is doing and then I was like, “OK, let’s see what’s going on here at SUU.”

Wyatt: And what did you find?

Mancuso: So I didn’t have that much data because salary data for faculty and…

Wyatt: Well, we only gave you the data for the men. [All laugh]

Mancuso: Exactly, that was the problem. [Laughs]

Wyatt: [To audience] That was a joke [All laugh]

Mancuso: No, there’s…salary data is only published for the previous year, so for now, there’s only data for 2017, and when I did it in 2017, I could only find data for 2016. So I only had 180 faculty members and was only looking at 2016, so that was an issue in my research, but I found out that there is a gender pay gap at SUU. It’s not big—my data shows that it’s only about 5%, and this could be what is really happening or this could be reflecting the fact that I had a small sample size. I also went and looked at different colleges at SUU and the only college that looks like they have a gender pay gap issue is the College of Science and Engineering—about 7%. But again, it might be that all of the colleges have an issue, I just don’t have enough data right now.

Wyatt: So a small sample?

Mancuso: Yeah.

Wyatt: But you learned enough to cause us to say, “Huh, we need to study this more.”

Mancuso: Yeah.

Wyatt: I’m hoping that what you found is that it’s improving.

Mancuso: Well, I don’t know because I don’t have historical data.

Wyatt: That’s right. We need to study this again each year.

Mancuso: Yeah, for sure.

Wyatt: So, what was the most interesting part of the research for you ?

Mancuso: It was…I don’t know. Well when I did this, I was talking my econometrics class and so at the beginning, I thought my model would go one way and I would have to have some certain things in my data, and then when I was going on with the class, I was like, “Oh wait, there’s other methods that I could use.” And so I learned a lot. I used STADA which is a special software for running regressions which is way better than Excel, so I learned a lot. It was a lot of learning. [Laughs]

Wyatt: Good. Did you have comparisons across the country?

Mancuso: I was only looking at SUU. I had…at the beginning in my paper, I talk about how the U.S. is doing and then the fact that Utah is a little bit behind the other states. Because it looks like the gender wage gap now is at 80%, meaning that women only make $.80 for $1.00 that a man makes, and that’s a little bit low—actually, 70%, sorry, it’s 80% nationwide and it’s 70% in Utah—and so I was like, “Oh, well in Utah we’re kind of stuck at the point where the U.S. was 30 years ago.” So that was really interesting.

Wyatt: So, what class are you?

Mancuso: I’m a junior.

Wyatt: Junior. So will you be here next here?

Mancuso: Yes.

Wyatt: You should make this your project next year.

Mancuso: Well if you give me more data, I’ll do it for sure! [Laughs]

Wyatt: OK, we’re on. [All laugh] So remind me of this.

Mancuso: I love it.

Wyatt: Let’s do it next year, and that will give us a challenge to make sure that it’s better than what it was in ’16.

Mancuso: Yes.

Wyatt: But I think we can give you more current data.

Mancuso: That would be awesome.

Wyatt: So if you connect up with me, you can have the very best, most current data.

Mancuso: Perfect.

Wyatt: Alright. Because this is really important to us.

Mancuso: Yeah, it’s a big issue.

Wyatt: This is kind of a fun project where you, as a student, studying the salary practices of  the university for the faculty under which you study. And hopefully having an impact on what we’re doing.

Mancuso: Yeah.

Wyatt: It’s something we need to always be aware of. Alright, what else did you…anything else that you…?

Mancuso: I think that was mostly it. I learned a lot…yeah.

Wyatt: OK. Well, as I mentioned, philosophy was my undergraduate major—I had a double major—and the other one was econ. So that’s a fun topic, I hope you [have] all the success.

Mancuso: Thank you.

Wyatt: OK, thank you so much Jessica. OK, Corrina Reid.

Corrina Reid: Yes.

Wyatt: How are you today?

Reid: I’m doing well, thank you. How are you?

Wyatt: Terrific! So, you got a project about athletics.

Reid: Yes.

Wyatt: So does that mean you’re an athlete?

Reid: I’m a physical education major, yes. A retired athlete.

Wyatt: A retired athlete.

Reid: Yes.

Wyatt: Well, Dr. Meredith and I are very retired athletes.

Meredith: Yeah.

Reid: OK.

Wyatt: So I don’t…

Reid: Athletics are for everybody.

Wyatt: So were you an athlete in high school?

Reid: Yeah.

Wyatt: What was your sport?

Reid: I did gymnastics.

Wyatt: OK. Why don’t you tell us about the research you did?

Reid: So my project was on the reliability of the standing long jump in NCAA Track & Field athletes. So we were determining how reliable the standing long jump is in determining lower body muscular power output for track and field athletes, because lower body muscular power output is very important in many sports.

Wyatt: And what did you find?

Reid: That yes, the standing long jump is a reliable test for determining lower body muscular output.

Wyatt: And what was the most interesting part of that for you? Or what’s the best application of that?

Reid: I guess the best application is that for those athletes who need to measure lower body muscular power output and to determine it, it’s a lot cheaper than to do a vertical jumping test which costs lots of money, takes more time. Whereas the standing long jump, it’s cheaper, doesn’t take as much time, you don’t need as much equipment so it’s just easier and it’s just as effective.

Wyatt: What kind of equipment do you need?

Reid: For the standing long jump?

Wyatt: For the standing long jump.

Reid: Just a tape measurer.

Wyatt: A tape measurer and some sand. Or whatever you jump in.

Reid: You don’t need sand. Just a tape measurer to measure how long they’re jumping.

Wyatt: So in your future life, how will this help you?

Reid: Well I plan to eventually go on and get my masters and Ph.D., so I think this is a good starting point to eventually work towards where I can reach that level of knowledge.

Wyatt: How far along are you in your studies?

Reid: I’ll be starting my master’s this summer.

Wyatt: So you’re moving right along. Does that mean you’re graduating this semester?

Reid: Yes.

Wyatt: So right at the very end, Corrina, what do you have to say to the rest of the students here?

Reid: You can do it! [All laugh]

Wyatt: You can do it. Thank you very much.

Reid: Thank you.

Wyatt: We look forward to seeing you in a master’s degree program. And someday when Steve and I decide that we’re going to go back from retirement to become super athletes, we expect you to be there to help us, OK?

Reid: Alright, I’ll be there.

Wyatt: [Laughter] Thank you so much.

Meredith: You’ve been listening to Solutions for Higher Education, a podcast featuring President Scott L Wyatt of Southern Utah University. This has been Part 1 of a special, live two part podcast from SUU’s Festival of Excellence, featuring the winners of the distinguished student project award. We’ll be back with Part 2 of this podcast next week. Thanks for listening, bye bye.