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Hello, my name is Shefa Gordon or Shefi. I graduated from Jones College in 1998. One thing that I value in a college education that Rice provides in more ways than one is that you can really expand your horizons. You should really be taking classes outside your

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major. Take a philosophy class, take a, uh, classes, uh, in, in, in this, in, in different sciences. Uh, just, you can, you can audit classes. But what makes, uh, it is really cool is that, um, they have this pass fail system that encourages you to take

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classes for credit, uh, that are outside your major. So, because it's pass fail, you don't have to worry about it affecting your GPA. But, uh, but if, if in many schools you take a class pass fail and you do the minimum and you don't actually try

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to, uh, pass the class. And do you really get that much out of it? But at Rice, you can actually change that pass, fail into a grade. Even after you see the final grade, the professor doesn't know that you're taking that class pass fail. But if

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you work hard and you get a decent grade. You can actually keep that because you're only allowed four pass fail classes, uh, total at your, uh, throughout college you can only take one per semester. But as long as you always have a class that's, they pass

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fail, you get to keep them and recycle them. And so I did that and as a bioscience major I took classes in upper level linguistics. I took, uh, a chemical engineering class, um a senior level chemical engineering class without any of the prereqs. Um I audited

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a physics class on relativity. Um I took a computer science class and I took this electrical engineering class, a senior level class on how the, the the engineering systems of the body. Uh And it really inspired me to go into neuroscience uh which, you know, my

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father is also a neuroscientist. But here's the thing I found out that Dr Clark who was teaching that upper level class, he inspired me to, to, to, to, to study neuroscience. He was actually, he had been a phd student at Case Institute where my dad was

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in college and he had taught the same class and inspired my dad to also go into neuroscience. So uh talk about the symmetry there just being able to take things way outside your major is uh is what college is all about. I now that I'm many

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years past college, I wish I had a similar opportunity like that.