Amy Parsons [00:00:04] Hi, I’m Amy Parsons, president of Colorado State University and host of “The Next 150” podcast. We have so many remarkable people in our community. And this is where we’re going to hear their stories. We’re going to get their perspectives on CSU’s next 150 years and gather their very best advice for today’s CSU students. Let’s get started, Rams! Hi Rams, Amy Parsons here with another episode of CSU’s Next 150. And today, I’m very excited to have our very own Dr. Marion Underwood with us, our provost and executive vice president. Welcome to the studio.

 

Marion Underwood [00:00:37] Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

 

Amy Parsons [00:00:39] Well, for those of you who are watching, you might see that we are in new space that we haven’t been in before. So this is the first episode that we’re doing in the new space. What do you think about the new space?

 

Marion Underwood [00:00:47] I think it’s beautiful. I never saw this old space, but this looks really nice.

 

Amy Parsons [00:00:49] The old space was my office, so.

 

Marion Underwood [00:00:53] Oh, this is lovely.

 

Amy Parsons [00:00:53] So this is great. Yeah. One thing that I am adding to the studio, and I just want to show you this, Marion, and I’ll show on the camera. Look at this beautiful cross stitch of a ram. This was actually given to me just yesterday by an employee on campus who was inspired to make this by a previous podcast episode, the one with Jenny Cavnar, where she talks about how a stitch is an analogy through a story about a students journey through CSU and where it ends. And so she was so inspired to create this. Isn’t it beautiful?

 

Marion Underwood [00:01:22] It is beautiful.

 

Amy Parsons [00:01:24] It is. So this is going to be a new addition to the podcast studio, but I’ll just keep it here for today. So. So Marion, in previous podcast episodes, we start with a random question that we draw from the bowl. So we’re going to do that today. So go ahead and draw a number and that’ll tell us what question we’re going to start with.

 

Marion Underwood [00:01:42] The number is two.

 

Amy Parsons [00:01:44] Okay. So says we’re both supposed to share a fact we love about CSU. You go first.

 

Marion Underwood [00:01:53] Okay. You know, it’s really a set of facts, but I love that CSU is a university with a deep commitment to access to equity, but also excellence on every dimension. We offer so many outstanding academic programs. We have a phenomenal research enterprise, and I love that more than 5000 of our students work in labs or studios, or they work closely with faculty on their research or artistry. That’s incredible for a university of our size.

 

Amy Parsons [00:02:20] Yeah, that is amazing. That’s, you wrapped up so much in that one beautiful answer. I was going to say something that that I’ve really been thinking about, about CSU is just how engaged our student leaders are, our student government, and especially in an election year, how focused they are on getting other students registered to vote, participating in democracy, joining clubs, whether it’s CSU or something else. They are such a committed group of student leaders right now. It just makes me so proud and it really just ripples out to the entire CSU community.

 

Marion Underwood [00:02:50] So it does. And I think shared governance is also really, really special here, and that’s one form of it.

 

Amy Parsons [00:02:55] Its. It is.

 

Marion Underwood [00:02:56] Faculty councils, the staff councils, the multicultural staff and faculty council, that’s really special and distinctive.

 

Amy Parsons [00:03:02] It is. And sometimes we leave out the students, right? As a as a real form of shared government. They’re very organized. It’s a very professional organization. They work with lobbyists. The work that they do on behalf of CSU and advocacy is really important. And it also has my heart because I was in ASCSU here at CSU. So, so and we weren’t nearly as professional as they are now. They are amazing.

 

Marion Underwood [00:03:25] I see them everywhere.

 

Amy Parsons [00:03:25] They are everywhere. Nick DeSalvo, Braxton Dietz, the group that we have right now I think is really special. So so Marion, let’s pivot toward talking about your journey to becoming the provost and executive vice president of CSU. You’re trained as a clinical psychologist, so take us back a bit to how you chose that as a profession in the first place, and then we’ll talk about your role as leadership.

 

Marion Underwood [00:03:50] Sure. Well, I thought I wanted to be a clinical psychologist to prepare to be a practicing psychotherapist, and that is something that I learned to do along the way. But when I was a junior in a research methods class at Wellesley College, my professor, Jonathan Cheek, pulled me aside after class and he said, “You know, you seem like you really like this, and would you want to work with me this summer? I could. I could pay you to work in my lab for the summer.” And I said, “Well, what would I do?” And he said, “Well, I would teach you.” And that was life changing because he showed me just how amazing and magical research could be, and I fell in love with it. And so I still pursued clinical psychology because clinical psychologist are educated to be researchers and clinicians. But that was a pivotal moment. So I went to graduate school at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and I was fortunate to have a number of offers of admission but I chose that place because of the person who I would be working with. John Couey, still a lifelong mentor, and I just felt like I could work so well with him. And that was that was so true. It was also a fateful choice because I met my husband, Andrew, there, and we’ve been together together ever since. And so I earned my degree there and I fell in love with teaching. I had opportunities to teach as a graduate student, so I thought I’d like to go to a liberal arts college where teaching. It’s really at the center. So I started my career at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, which was just a wonderful place and outstanding, fiercely intellectual students who I think really taught me a lot about how to teach. How to lead discussions. And that was an amazing place. They were also wonderful in the lab. They all do senior thesis there. And so I got to work with several of them and and got my first research grants at Reed. And then as my parents were aging and as I was wanting to add to our family, we had a two year old and I wanted to have another baby. I thought it might be good to be closer to them. So I moved to University of Texas at Dallas in 1998, and that again was driven by a decision about a person. I, I had met the dean of the COB, the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Bert Moore. And I just realized what a phenomenal leader he was. And I thought I would love to work with him. And I was there 20 years as a very happy faculty member, teaching, doing research. And I would be invited to do administrative roles or to lead programs. And I would always say, now, you know, I want to really focus on my teaching and my research, but I’ll do projects. I would love to do projects. And so I did a number of those projects, and the provost there told me, “After a while you will say yes to me one day.” And I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because you’ll be tired of having administration done to you.” But I never got there because I had this great dean and mentor. I was approached about being the graduate dean in 2015 and it seemed like it wasn’t a good fit because my heart had been in undergraduate education. But I talked to my mentors and they said, That’s a great job. You work across the whole university. So I did that. I had the opportunity to build a great team. I really enjoyed that, expected to do that for a very long time and then was recruited for a Dean position at Purdue University in West Lafayette. And that was a wonderful opportunity to lead a College of Health and Human Sciences. It was just a great fit for my discipline and that was a wonderful opportunity to be at an innovative, fast-moving, forward-thinking university. And I was happy there. It was possible to pursue my research career while being a dean, and it meant a lot to me. There I was selected as a University Distinguished Professor, which is like a faculty led process like it is here. And that’s one of my my proudest honors. But when the pandemic hit, I realized I just poured myself into leading that college through that transition. And and that’s what I started to do more and more. So I thought I would be there for the rest of my career. And then I was contacted about this position at Colorado State by by Dean Lise Youngblade. And I didn’t know, I knew Colorado State was excellent, but I didn’t know how excellent until I looked at that position description. And the position was attractive to me because it’s a provost. Provost positions are configured differently and this is a strong one, provost and executive vice president. And it’s positioned as as number two to you. And after meeting you, I thought, I want to come work to advance her initiatives to advance your initiatives. I also really appreciate that I have the chance to work with outstanding academic deans, deans of the graduate school, deans of libraries, phenomenal teams. I really like here that the provost and executive vice President oversees the Office of Research Enrollment and Access and Student Affairs, each of whom are led by dynamic, phenomenal leaders. But it’s such a great chance to collaborate, to try to influence everything about a student’s experience.

 

Amy Parsons [00:08:25] Yeah. So you’ve been here. Is it almost a year now?

 

Marion Underwood [00:08:29] I started in January, so just about nine months.

 

Amy Parsons [00:08:31] So we’re going on a on a year now. So it’s a dangerous question for me to ask, but I’m going to ask it. How’s it going? Or what has been most surprising to you about moving into this role of provost and executive vice president?

 

Marion Underwood [00:08:42] You know, I’ve worked closely with wonderful provosts, so I think I knew what the role would be like and the magnitude of the role. I think the surprise has really been that the combination of at Colorado State, of deep caring for students, really dedication to a deep dedication to teaching, and also the outstanding research enterprise that is a rare combination. And that that caring community, coupled with the excellence, excellence and research excellence and extension and engagement that is so amazing and distinctive. And I knew it before I got here, but I didn’t know how how deeply it’s lived. The other the other really happy surprise has been shared governance. This is a strong, a shared governance I’ve seen at any university.

 

Amy Parsons [00:09:25] No, I’m glad to hear you say that. That’s something we’ve been proud of at CSU for a long time. So it’s great to have that outside perspective and also shout out to Dean Lise Youngblade, for reaching out to you in the first place. That’s a great story. So I’m glad that she reached out to you and that you were interested in looking at CSU. What are you most looking forward to in year two? You, I dont want to, you’ve got a couple of months left of year one. But looking at year two, what does that look like for you that’s maybe different from your first year?

 

Marion Underwood [00:09:53] I think so much of it will be a continuation. I’m still on a steep learning curve and I’m just so enjoying chances to get to know faculty and students and staff. But in year two, I’m looking forward to adding some new team members we’ve hired recently to, to working with with the faculty on, on some really innovative things we want to do with our curriculum to highlight our distinctive excellence at CSU. I’m really excited about the university’s work in climate and sustainability, the opportunity to develop new academic programs. CSU deserves so much more recognition, I think, than we receive. I think this is a place of humility where people don’t maybe toot our own horns loud enough. So I’m looking forward to trying to help us get the recognition we deserve. The university, the faculty, the staff, the students. This is an outstanding university.

 

Amy Parsons [00:10:42] Yeah, I’m right there with you on that. I look forward to working with you in that. You know, you mentioned when you were talking about your journey to this position, having mentors along the way. Talk about what you can do in your role as provost and EVP to sort of cultivate that, that environment of people being mentors and searching for mentors for themselves.

 

Marion Underwood [00:11:02] Sure. There’s so many practical things I can do. But I think one important thing is to really always lead by example and acknowledging that we’re all works in progress because we are. And I need mentors and I’m always trying to be better and to learn from every day. And I think being open about that helps create a culture where it’s perfectly acceptable to ask for help, to ask for mentors. And I’m delighted that the Faculty Affairs Office leads with a number of mentoring programs, including one for chairs and heads who who really do set the tone and the climate in their units. So there’s those practical things. I’ve been approached by several people since being here who straight up asked me like, “Would you be my mentor in this disciplinary mentoring program?” Or, or, “I’m thinking about this new position. Would you mentor me?” And I always say yes, but, but I always believe that that’s really about mentoring each other because these people have experiences I don’t have. I learned so much from that. I think it’s worth talking about. I think it’s worth modeling that even leaders need mentors. And so our three new deans each have a mentor, a peer, dean, mentor and I, you know, talk to them about it and would they be open to it? And I have some ideas of who might be good and everybody happily agreed. And everybody has networks of mentors. But when a person is brand new, they need somebody to start. They need somebody they can call and somebody who will invite them out to lunch or out to coffee and help them feel included.

 

Amy Parsons [00:12:24] Well, you mentioned our two new deans. We’ve built what I think is a very remarkable leadership team here at CSU. And when you look at it, you can’t help but notice how many of them are women, not just you and I, but our vice president for research, maybe six of our eight deans right now, vice president for Office of Inclusive Excellence in Student Affairs, Our women. Which is remarkable. I love that. Is that unusual? I think given the number of institutions that you’ve worked and what you’ve seen?

 

Marion Underwood [00:12:54] It’s unusual. I thought this is my fourth university. It’s unusual compared to places I’ve been, and I think it’s unusual nationally. What I know is true of the hires that I’ve been involved in, so the new deans, each was selected because they are the most outstanding person for the job. I think we see more women in leadership pipelines and higher education. And here I’ll talk like the psychologist I am and it’ll sound like I’m talking in broad, sweeping stereotypes, but I think it is true that women are socialized to be able to consider others needs in addition to our own. And we have experiences that help us think of multiple people’s needs at the same time. And I think we are socialized to listen and socialized to be a little bit more conciliatory. And I think those skills serve us well as long as we have the courage to speak up, lean into who we are, be bold about our ideas. I think that combination, for women who have the interest in leadership, serves us very well. And I think there’s scientific evidence that women leaders of countries led, that women, the countries that had women leaders, fared a little bit better in the pandemic in terms of some of the health outcomes. Even I have a colleague at Purdue who studies leadership of nursing homes and in nursing homes led by women in the pandemic had better outcomes in terms of the satisfaction of the residents. And so, you know, I think we bring, we bring special skills to leadership roles. And I think many of us are interested in leadership because we love developing people. We want to help people be the best that they can be. And I think that’s a really key part of my role.

 

Amy Parsons [00:14:29] Yeah. And you and I both happen to also be mothers of daughters.

 

Marion Underwood [00:14:33] Yes, we are.

 

Amy Parsons [00:14:33] We each have two daughters. So I think I, I think I heard in what you just said some of the advice that I can imagine that you give your daughters as they have gone through their academic careers. But anything you want to share about advice that that you give to your own girls?

 

Marion Underwood [00:14:49] Yes. The advice I give to them is the advice I would I would give to anybody coming up. And that comes from the title of a Cal Newport book, “Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” So don’t don’t worry about who talks first or who talks the most. Listen as much as you talk. Do everything you do with excellence when you speak. Build on what others have said and people will listen to you. And so develop your skills. Do whatever you’re asked to do, even if it’s not your your dream job, even if it’s a beginning responsibility, do it as well as you possibly can. Learn as much as you possibly can. Try to focus on helping other people and lead from where you are. Because no matter where you are in your journey, there’s somebody coming up behind you. You know, you could be a first year student starting college, but maybe maybe you have a parent who went to college and your roommate didn’t, and you can always help other people around you. And so if you feel, feel discouraged or get kind of stuck in your own head, I think it’s really good to focus on somebody else.

 

Amy Parsons [00:15:46] Yeah, yeah, focus on someone else. And I tell my girls to listen to your intuition. You often know what the right path is, what the right decision is, right? What is the right next thing to do? You just have to really be in tune with yourself to really understand that and go forward. I’m fortunate to have both of my girls here at CSU, a freshman and a junior, and especially in my junior. The development I’ve seen from her in college, the the maturity and in how she sees herself and her place in the world and how she’s navigating things is absolutely remarkable. It’s so satisfying, I think, as a parent and a university leader to actually see firsthand the development of these students in their undergraduate careers, taking things from their job that they’re doing, from research, from classes that might have nothing to do with their major, but around the dinner table. That’s what they’re talking about, thinking about, and that development is absolutely amazing.

 

Marion Underwood [00:16:45] It is. It’s transformational. And that’s why it’s such a joy to work in higher education, to see everything the students become and to see them become more comfortable, more courageous, more able to solve their own problems, more self-reliant.

 

[00:16:57] Yeah.

 

Marion Underwood [00:16:57] It’s a wonderful it’s a wonderful thing to see.

 

Amy Parsons [00:17:01] It is. You know, we talk a lot at CSU about our institutional priorities, as we’re talking about students, and we always say student success is number one. You know, I base a lot of what I talk about on the Boyer Report and the Excellence Equity imperative, and so much of that is grounded in the focus on the undergraduate student and their success and their journey. So we’re always talking about student success here, followed close behind by excellence in our academics and in our research. And then we get into, you know, outreach and extension around the world and institutional competitiveness and democracy. Talk about how your role as the provost and the executive vice president works with those priorities in your day-to-day work and sort of set the course for the academic enterprise?

 

Marion Underwood [00:17:50] Well, as soon as I heard your fall address, not this past year, which was also great, but the year before the first one, I happened to be in town looking for a house. And, and your priorities came through so loud and clear. I sat on the plane and typed it into a word document and started thinking about everything a Provost and EVP team could do to support those priorities. And and I’ve shown you that list a few times along the way, it just gets longer and longer and it morphs. But in the, in the realm of student success, I think we really need to look at our institutional learning objectives and make them more distinctive to the excellence we have here at CSU. And then we need to to innovate in our undergraduate core curriculum to line that curriculum up with areas of distinctive excellence. And the curriculum belongs to the faculty. And so a faculty task force is working on that. But I think the themes that they are likely to select and the same ones that were in the academic master plan, some of them might be democracy one, health, climate and sustainability. I heard a wonderful idea for a theme on Colorado. So many students come to see us because we are located in Colorado. And what if a student could take all of her courses, undergraduate core courses around the theme of Colorado?

 

Amy Parsons [00:18:57] That’s an interesting idea. I had not heard that before.

 

Marion Underwood [00:18:59] Yeah, faculty have wonderful ideas. So, they’ll bring good things to the table. We’re also doing some kind of realignment of academic advising on campus. It’s strong. It’s working very well, but we’d like it to be a little bit more connected. We’d like there to be more of a professional development ladder, career possibilities for our advisors to move up within the university. So I’m very excited about that. I could go on. You want me to talk about the other priorities, too?

 

Amy Parsons [00:19:25] Well, let’s talk a little bit about how you came to us at a time that we were very much involved with the Thematic Year of Democracy, and we’ve obviously carried that through this year. So I am interested in just your perspective on democracy and and civic engagement and how you see that potentially laddering up at CSU to one of these core areas that we focus on.

 

Marion Underwood [00:19:46] Oh, absolutely. So I was I feel very fortunate to have arrived in the midst of the thematic year that we’re now baking into everything. So I got to see you interview Jane Fonda. I got to see, I got to hear amazing talks through, through last year and into this fall. And those are wonderful opportunities. And, but I want us to bake those, those big ideas into the way we teach, into the way we learn. And so, TILT, our Teaching, our The Institute for Learning and Teaching offers fantastic courses on inclusive teaching, inclusive pedagogy, and so many other aspects of excellence in teaching. They, they have been working on some courses on democracy, how we can help students have difficult discussions. And so Martín Carcasson, who leads the Center for Public Deliberation, has been developing some activities that student leaders used in orientation that are being used in first year seminars. There, but there was a TILT workshop about how you could build in practices into how students teach to help them learn these skills of disagreeing better, of being able to talk about difficult challenges without making it about people. So I really like what Martín says about wicked problems, not wicked people. As we head toward the election, I’m so impressed by our student government’s engagement, by the messaging from the university about the importance of participation. I’m hoping to send a message to our faculty soon to help them get ready for this election season. And as we think about we, I think we all need to think about how we can speak in ways that make it possible for students across the political spectrum to feel comfortable. To feel good about sharing their perspectives. How we can cope with some anxiety that people might be feeling as the election season unfolds. How we can cope with that for ourselves. How we can cope with it for our students. And then also just what our pedagogical strategies, how what can you do in a classroom? There’s been some really nice offerings from the Chronicle of Higher Education, including a piece that was titled “Students Don’t Like It When Faculty Ignore Public Events.” And so I think there is wisdom in briefly acknowledging that, and in some classes teaching about the election that’s more appropriate in some disciplines than others. And again, TILT has developed just a fantastic election toolkit. And our College of Liberal Arts is going to offer a wonderful session called “Teaching After the Election.” And at first they were offering that just for the College of Liberal Arts but it looks so good I called our new dean, Kjerstin Thorson, and I said, “Is it okay if I invite the whole faculty?” And she graciously said yes.

 

Amy Parsons [00:22:16] That’s wonderful. How timely. I’d love to be able to see that.

 

Marion Underwood [00:22:19] Yeah.

 

[00:22:19] Well you touched on several really important things, I think, there, and that when we talk about a student’s academic journey coming through, there’s so much more to student success than just the academic journey. And you talked about anxiety around the election, students are dealing with a whole variety of stressors and mental health issues on campus. And so drawing on your experience as a psychologist and, and thinking about now how we best support our students in this area, how are you viewing that today? And what we at CSU, higher ed in general, ought to be doing to really support our students and their mental health as they go through their academic journey with us?

 

Marion Underwood [00:22:57] Oh, I think there’s so much we can do. So many things have changed about teaching and learning with the advent of technology. And I’ll put in a quick plug, I’m hosting the Provost Ethics Colloquium on Mental Health in Higher Education by Dr. Katie Rose Guest Pryal, who wrote a book called “A Light in the Tower: A Reckoning for Mental Health in Higher Education.” And she makes so many excellent points in that, in that book that I wholeheartedly endorse. So everything about higher education is about our minds. It’s about learning, being smart. Some of us worry a lot. Are we smart enough to be here? Do we, are we intellectual? Do we fit in? We’re trying to improve our minds. But if we’re, if we’re struggling with depression or anxiety that compromises our ability to teach and to learn. And there’s a lot of stigma around mental illness, especially in a university community where brilliance is valued and where people think it’s all or nothing. You’re, you’re brilliant or you’re nothing. And we we know that’s not true. I think as teachers, we can take seriously our responsibility to challenge and inspire students. But really think about how we set up our classes to make it more possible for all students to learn. So Dr. Pryal talks about good heart and bad heart. And good heart is offering students challenging material, challenging ideas, challenging assignments. Bad heart is things that make our lives harder, make their lives harder. Like really strict attendance policies or, you know, punitive things. Things that, that, that feel a little bit like busywork that’s hard on the faculty, it’s hard on the students. Everything about teaching and learning has changed with the advent of technology, and we need to change how we think about it. And in here TILT us leading the way again and in inclusive pedagogy, and that’s a lot of what Dr. Pryal responds to. University communities need to set up everything. We need to be mindful that everything in our in our community should be fostering well-being. We need to be offering students opportunities for belonging from the time they show up. We need a range of organizations, a range of activities where everybody who’s feeling a little lonely might feel comfortable showing up to something. We need to create a climate where it’s okay to sit down at a, at a table with people you don’t know and feel feel like you’ll be welcomed. We need a really strong counseling center, which we have. CSU should be very, very proud of the health network and the counseling center and their innovative service model. But, but they need more resources. We need more competitive salaries. I think we need a virtual tool for 24 seven online access to counseling and therapy. But we all need to be more mindful. Most of us will struggle with mental illness to some degree in our lifetimes. I think as leaders we need to model taking care of ourselves.

 

Amy Parsons [00:25:37] So as we’re getting close to the end of our time, I always like to end talking about students. So we’re talking about students now and and their mental health and the ways that we can support them on their journey. Can you share with us how you view advice for students who might be thinking about college? Maybe they’re in high school wondering if college is for them or not. What’s the value of a college degree as they’re thinking about “Can I afford it?” “Is it worth it to go to college?” I certainly have a strong opinion about it, but what advice would you give to those students as they’re thinking about whether or not to go to college?

 

Marion Underwood [00:26:12] Yeah. I think it’s important for every student to consider whether they’re ready for it at this point in their lives. And some are ready at 17 and 18 and some are ready at 21 and some are ready later. If you’re, if there’s any part of a student who’s wondering, “Can I do it? Am I smart enough?” Try to quiet that voice. Because know that colleges and universities are full of people who want to help students thrive. We want to welcome students from all kinds of backgrounds, and we want to challenge them, but we want to offer a high level of support. So I think it’s a very reasonable question to ask, “Am I ready to do this at this point in my life? Is this what I want to do?” If it is what you want, come, come and think about choosing a large university where you can work with faculty who are on the cutting edge of their disciplines that a large university can offer so many wonderful opportunities for your learning, academic programs. Know that it’s okay if you don’t know exactly what you want to do. That is completely normal. Come start. We’ll help you figure it out.

 

Amy Parsons [00:27:14] And be involved in research. And I think that that is such an important part of a a big research institution like this is the undergraduate experience and opportunities there. So let’s pivot to the students who are here as CSU, maybe the brand new students who are in their first or second year — advice for them as they are navigating their way through the system.

 

Marion Underwood [00:27:36] I think just learn as much as possible. Be open. I really do believe in that advice. Be so good they can’t ignore you. That that comes from a line from Steve Martin. Lots of aspiring comedians would ask him, “How can we become like you?” And he would say, “Just practice just to work at it.” You know, learn as much as you can. Ask questions when you don’t understand. Go see your faculty members. Don’t think you have to know everything you came here to learn. So learn as much as you can. Be, do excellent work, ask all the questions. But also really take care of yourselves because you cannot learn if you’re exhausted. You can’t learn if you’re consumed with anxiety, you can’t learn if you’re hungry. So please, please take advantage of the resources the university offers. Eat. Sleep. Ask for help if you need it. We’re here to support you.

 

Amy Parsons [00:28:29] Well, that’s a great place to end. Thank you, Marion. Thank you. And thank you for coming to CSU. It’s just. It’s a privilege to work with you and you’re doing amazing work as our previous and EVP and really excited to see what you’re going to do in your year two with us at CSU. So thank you so much.

 

Marion Underwood [00:28:47] Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.

 

Amy Parsons [00:28:48] And Rams, that was good advice. Be so good they can’t ignore you. You heard it here first. So great advice. Thank you, Marion. Go Rams. Thank you for listening. I’m Amy Parsons, President of Colorado State University, and you are listening to CSU’s “The Next 150,” where we explore what comes next for CSU by chatting with changemakers who are already leading the charge and shaping our next 150 years. I’m gathering their very best advice for today’s CSU students. Stay tuned to wherever you get podcasts for our next outstanding conversation. Go Rams.