What are you really trying to teach students when you have them out in the woods, 14,000 acres, around the campfire, cooking? What are the main primal lessons you're getting across there?

Yeah.

So I think I would start that question by starting to kind of define students a little bit.

So we certainly have our traditional students enrolled within our culinary baking or hospitality programs and the learning outcomes associated with those outdoor kitchen labs.

I'm happy to expand upon, but I also want to add that this outdoor cooking labs are a tool that we use to engage prospective students as well so we'll have groups of high school students come to campus and uh and we want to kind of showcase what i believe is our point of differentiation at paul smith's college you know our landscape and our kind of unique setting and then we also have a non-traditional learner which would be our career professionals right um our uh alumni, other culinary educators in the region.

And so I think for each of those user groups, I like to kind of tailor the learning objectives to that group, understanding where, you know, there may be core competencies are or are not In the example of a traditional student, I think that for the most part, the students that we're bringing out into the outdoor classroom have had some culinary theory and they've had some culinary practical experience in our labs.

And so in that setting, what I really love about the outdoor kitchen or classroom is that it's really stripping away all of the niceties that you have indoors, right? You don't have...

challenges with all of this outdoor cooking, right? I mean, there's gotta be like weather, and safety and sanitation? Because again, do you have running water? Like what are some of these challenges that students are facing and maybe have to overcome or figure out as they're working through the outdoor cooking lesson?

What eventually drew you, though, to teaching and to Paul Smith's in particular?

So, um, I would offer, uh, to touch briefly on, on the time in the military as, uh, what drew me to teaching.

And so the submarine was an environment where I, um, quickly grew in my leadership responsibilities.

I, um, because I had all that culinary experience and because I had gone to some culinary post-secondary training in New Orleans before the military, I, uh, I ended up, um, growing in rank really quickly in the Navy.

And as you grow in rank, you grow in responsibility, and your job really changes from doing the, the physical task to supervising the people doing the physical task.

And so I found myself as, as a very, you know, young guy in the military, um, supervising a team that had a really important job.

You know, we fed 150 people four meals a day, and we did so in an environment where they had absolutely no other option to get something to eat, right? And so, um, not only did we have to do our job well for thehealth and well-being of the crew, it also influenced the morale and the esprit de corps, right, the overall mental well-being of the unit.

Are those open to the public?