Hi! Im Dr. Marcheta Wright and Im going to chat with you today about a decision that had a significant impact on my life that shaped who and where I am today. It all started back in college and I know this is going to sound very cliche and very stereotypical but it really really really is the truth. So freshman year in college, actually first week of freshman year in college before classes even started. They had the stereotypical activities fair at my undergraduate school, and I went to college planning on being a math and physics major. I was going into astronomy, I was going into laser physics. I was going to solve the mysteries of the stars, that was my goal in life. However, at the activities fair, I ended up meeting up with this group of students who were involved in this odd weird thing called the Mile United nations club and it sounded vaguely interesting to me so I signed up and a few weeks later I got a phone call. And of course remember this was back in the day before internet, before cell phones, before texting, all of that. So yes, it was a phone call. Anyway, back to my story. So, they told me to come to the first meeting, I went and the mile united nations club was a club that just as today debates in the format of united nations. So I decided to go on their first trip which was to pittsburg and I represented the united kingdom and the security council, and the following semester in the spring I ended up at new york city at nationals and the four of us represented angola which is in southwestern africa. And we won nationals. So long story short, by the end of my freshman year I had decided that political science was what I wanted to pursue. So I dropped the physics major, I kept my math major and added political science. So I was a math poli-sci double major. And the reason why all of this is significant is because that's what I ended up continuing to pursue through college. I then decided to go to graduate school, for international relations, but I couldn't afford to pay for graduate school. I already had student loans just like most of you and so I needed fellowships. So I applied to a graduate teaching assistantship, and I got it. but the reason that I got it was because of the math and political science dual major. It was the quantitative math side, the statistics, the computer science courses that I had to take along with that, which landed me the research assistantship in graduate school that payed for all four years. So, critical decision, did I know that it was a critical decision? that week in my first year of college no, I had no clue that deciding to join this club was going to have this kind of impact on my life. But it did, it ended up paying for graduate school for me, having that combination of majors, and then today as some of you may know Im faculty member here at Lynn, Ive been teaching since 1986 full-time and I teach international relations. My career has followed the international relations specifically the human rights path. I don't do that much with the quantitative side of me anymore. But geometry is still one of my secret passions. So there you have it, that was the story of what was seemingly an inconsequential decision, that has had a pretty profound impact on where I ended up. Hello! Im Joe hall, associate professor of anthropology here at lynn university. My initial training academically was in anthropology at the university of Pennsylvania. I actually lived in Italy for quite a while and was training to be a specialist in bronze age Mediterranean region. However, on getting the phd it turned out that that was a really narrow field which I probably should have foreseen before I got started. And I went from job to job sort of as a nomad we used to call those folks, academic nomads. And I went from one visiting professorship to another. Very nice schools and it built a great resume. I taught at Rutgers, MIT, University of Pennsylvania. But it was very tiring though, constantly being on the lookout for work. The next job, none of them were permanent. And then one day I went to a job fair for the federal government. Various agencies were there and I stopped by a table for the CIA, and I stopped by the booth for the FBI. What happened there was I was mildly interested in the CIA but having gone through some of the preliminary applications, I talked to the recruiter and was told really we don't like to hire phdf or pologist because they tend to go off into the field and do their own research rather than what their supposed to be doing for the government. I thought yeah, that's probably what I would do. So that didn't work out, but I already had some training in mandarin Chinese and it just so happened that that was one of the critical languages that the FBI was looking for. That gave me the option, actually of going into a special hiring pool, and fortuitously that year was a big hiring year for the special agent position in the FBI. Its kind of a quirky thing with the federal government, different agencies have more or less personnel coming on board depending on budgetary situations, at different times, different years. And it was fortuitous there that I was actually able to get hired by the bureau, go through their training situation and then work for a full career of 22 years basically outside of the academic world as a federal agent. Primarily in the field of asian organized crime because of the language. But after 9/11 I was eligible to retire and a situation came up that was again, fortuitous it was luck, here at lynn university, and I already had academic credentials and this allowed me to get back into the world of academia and continue teaching after having that long break as a federal employee in the middle of my academic world. Ive been here now for 13 years, so its worked out quite well with a little bit of luck and some other things happening