FirstGenFM
For educators looking to connect, learn, and share knowledge about serving first-generation college and college-bound students.
FirstGenFM
Supporting First-Generation Graduate Students: A New Program at The Chicago School with Jennifer Stripe Portillo
Curious about the unique hurdles first-generation graduate students face and solutions to support them? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Jennifer Stripe Portillo, Dean of Student Success and Title IX Coordinator at the Chicago School. Jennifer opens up about her own journey as a first-gen college student and shares how it's inspired her to create impactful programs tailored for graduate students. From personalized graduation cords to the last lecture series, mentorship partnerships, and first-gen faculty/staff directories, discover the innovative ways the Chicago School fosters a supportive environment, in both an in-person and virtual world.
We also dive into the nuts and bolts of their virtual mentorship program, emphasizing its flexibility and success. Learn how this initiative, along with optional training for mentors, has significantly benefited students, particularly those tackling dissertations. Jennifer discusses how they measure program effectiveness using engagement metrics and qualitative feedback, demystify institutional acronyms, and collaborate with programs like McNair. Her dedication to building a thriving community for first-gen students is fantastic, ensuring every student feels seen, heard, and supported throughout their educational journey.
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You can find me at https://www.firstgenfm.com/ and on LinkedIn. My email is jen@firstgenfm.com.
Hello, I'm Jennifer Schoen, your host for the First Gen FM podcast. Please Call Me Jen. Each week, I'll share my insights and ideas, solo or with a special guest, on creating opportunities to celebrate and support the first-generation college and college-bound students we work with. My goal with this podcast is to connect you with other high college and college-bound students. We work with. My goal with this podcast is to connect you with other high school and college educators, to share our successes and challenges and create a web of first-gen advocates. Thank you for joining me today.
Jen:Now let's dive into this week's episode. Today, we're going to be talking to Jennifer Stripe Portillo, who is at the Chicago School. She's the Dean of Student Success and the Title IX Coordinator, so the Chicago School has graduate campuses in five cities across the country and has a very robust online community of learners, and so she started a first-gen program for grad students from scratch, and so our conversation ranges from how they started with graduation cords, then to faculty and staff directories and last lecture series, to mentoring partnerships, but I'm going to let her talk more about that, so let's jump in and welcome Jennifer. Welcome, jennifer, to the First Gen FM podcast. I am so excited you're here and I really appreciate your joining me today, all the way from LA.
Jennifer:Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's nice to be here.
Jen:You are welcome. You know I'm really excited to talk about how you're doing First Gen programs for graduate students, and especially doing it virtually at the Chicago School, because I know you've probably had to think unconventionally about how you do that. But first I always like to start with what was the spark that got you started in education and with working with first-gen students?
Jennifer:Yeah, thank you so much. Great question. I'm first-gen, so first in my family to go to college. I'm first gen, so first in my family to go to college. I went to college because my parents told me to and I was pretty directionless for the first couple of years there. I think my lucky stars, I guess that I stuck it out because I felt pretty rudderless in the first couple of years. I went to a big state school. I love my alma mater, don't get me wrong. I went to Bowling Green in Ohio. Great experience there. But it took me a while to figure out what I was doing and how to navigate that place. You know it's a bigger state university and this was in the days before all of this wonderful first gen work existed. Yeah, so I, you know, I credit my experience as an undergraduate student with driving me towards a career in higher education and wanting to do for other students what student affairs professionals did for me once I found my way as an undergrad. And then I've sort of evolved into a focus on first gen in my role because I see the value in acknowledging it as a salient identity for our students, particularly at the graduate level.
Jennifer:Being a first gen grad student is no joke, you know there's. It is a very difficult, it's isolating, can be very isolating experience for students. So we are trying our best to, if nothing else, raise awareness and create community amongst students. They know they're not alone in pursuing graduate study. So it was really my own experience. And then I had the fortunate opportunity to win a small institutional grant from the Chicago School where I work, back in gosh, I think 2021. And we used that small grant to just plant some seeds of a program and we've seen it grow and blossom from there. So it's really self-serving in a lot of ways because of my own identity and just knowing our students and knowing what's important to them and being able to sort of wrap around them in ways that help them be successful. You know, graduate stay in school.
Jen:Yeah, yeah, and I yeah, I mean. I think often good things come from our own identity and our own experiences seeing that some things aren't working for some students who are like us and then being able to jump in there. So that's fabulous that you got a grant. Can you tell us a little bit more about the Chicago School and who your students are?
Jennifer:Yeah for sure, the Chicago School is 45 years old, so we're quite young when looking across the landscape of higher ed at some of our more storied institutions on the East Coast, for example, where you are, jennifer yeah, institutions on the East Coast, for example, where you are, jennifer yeah. We were founded by a group of clinical psychologists who were focused on practitioner model approach. So our primary degree program, our initial degree program, was the CITI in clinical psychology. It's a practitioner degree and that was 45 years ago. And now today we're a more generalist institution with programs sort of around the health sciences, psychology. In those domains We've got about 6,000 students at the Chicago School.
Jennifer:We have campuses in Washington DC, chicago, new Orleans, dallas, texas, los Angeles, anaheim and San Diego, california. We've got about 2,000 students studying virtually. So students who live all across the US as well as abroad who study with us in our online programs. Wow, most of our students are adult learners. They are primarily graduate students. We do have some undergrads now. We've had undergraduate programs for the past, you know five, seven years, maybe a few more, but we're still primarily graduate students, uh, masters and doc level students. So, um, our students have full lives, they're working professionals, they have families. They are often caring for aging parents. They are squeezing school somehow into their lives. Um, and it's uh. You know, school for a lot of our students is just another thing that they've got to do.
Jennifer:So we have to be really creative in how we reach them and engage them with this particular content, just to make sure that we're sort of meeting their needs. 60% of our students identify as first gen Six, six, zero, zero. Yes, that's a lot of students. That's six and ten in a group, so you know they're the first to go, uh, to graduate school in their families.
Jen:That's a big, that's a big deal yeah, that's outstanding, and so you saw this. Need you put? You put in for this grant? What? What was your first? What did you first do to try to build that sense of community and that idea that they're not alone out there?
Jennifer:Yeah, thank you for that question. Like so many schools, we did honor cords at commencement. So we spent all of our grant money on buying the braided cords that graduates wear to represent their unique identities and we give them away at commencement to students who identify as first gen. We don't make students prove to us that they're first, we just ask them if that's an identity that's important to them. If they say yes, we give them a cord and then they're able to wear that to have a physical representation of their identity, and it's been fascinating to watch. That has remained one of our signature programs, if you will. And at the Chicago School, because of our structure we've got, I think, we have four ceremonies a year one in California, one in Chicago, one in DC and one in Texas. And while I don't know this for a fact, it sure seems like most of the students who are attending those ceremonies are first gen, because most of the students in attendance are wearing those cords.
Jennifer:Not all of our students go to commencement. You know, particularly virtual students. They don't live in one of those geographic regions or it's not something like they're going to fit into their life even if they do live in the city. But for the ones that do attend. We see the majority of them wearing those cords and we've maintained that program through today. There's a little blurb in our commencement program that describes the cord and its meaning and we see students really connecting around that identity. We would love it if we could get that connection earlier, maybe at orientation, in their program. You know we've talked about ways to have that visible representation of the identity earlier so that students can sort of look around the room and see, you know, people who might share the identity with them earlier. That's on the wish list, on the can do list. Are is doing it at the end, which we think gives graduates, you know, good feeling going out the door and we hope that they'll stay engaged with us as alum and, you know, continue to be proud of their time at the school.
Jen:Yeah, I think the other cool thing about that is, as you said, it's visibility. But also others like faculty and staff, seeing people wearing that and saying, wow, there are a lot of first-gen students in our graduate programs, what does that mean? And then you can get allies that way who are realizing that this is a population that we probably should pay attention to.
Jennifer:Yeah, well, and we also offer cords to our faculty who participate in the ceremonies. So we see faculty sitting on the dais. The president of our institution is first gen. She wears a cord at the ceremony. So it creates, I think, more of that. Just I almost want to say normalizing, but that feels like the wrong word. It's just like there are so many people in this community and when you look around that room and see your favorite faculty member wearing a first gen cord the president of the institution wearing a first gen cord and then you look down and you see I'm wearing it too, you know there's more. We are more alike than we are different right.
Jennifer:So we can recognize sort of our similarities at those special events. And commencement is great. You know it's a lot of work to plan and execute but it's just a great celebration of student success and I love that this program can be represented there.
Jen:Yeah, you, actually you gave me an idea. I felt like how cool would that be to do that at a convocation where the faculty and the staff maybe you can't give it to all the students, but if you gave it to faculty and staff and in the program or at some point it was mentioned as to what that was that they were wearing, like making a mental note of that.
Jennifer:Yeah, and even you know, as a way to introduce the program and then as a way to as a persistence tool, right, Like when you graduate first gen master's student or first gen doctoral student, you'll get one of these and you'll get to keep it forever and ever and you can give it to your kids or whatever, hang it on your wall in your office or whatever you want to do with it. But just as a way, you know, some schools will do the like pin at convocation and then a companion pin at commencement or whatever as a means to sort of entice. Persistence could be used in that way as well.
Jen:Nice, so that, so that was your, your humble beginnings just three years ago, 2021. So how have you been able to do to add to that program with the, with the grad students?
Jennifer:We have. So we have some programs that you might think are pretty typical under a first-gen umbrella, things like a mentorship program. So we have a faculty-staff-student mentorship program, completely voluntary, where we have faculty and even senior students, like older graduate students, who will take on a mentor. It's a time-limited commitment. Two semesters is what we ask mentors and mentees to commit, and we pair based on interests and, in our case, like time zone, because it's difficult to have a mentee and a time zone that's five hours away.
Jennifer:You know, my mentee is in Paris and I'm in LA, then it's going to be hard to find a time to talk on the phone or have a meeting, especially when they're also working.
Jen:You know, and take school at the same time, exactly.
Jennifer:Yeah, so we we have a that we actually launched that program. So we are in our second year of the mentorship program. I think where it probably looks different than a mentorship program in a more traditional environment is it's completely virtual and it does it mean mentors and mentees sometimes we can have them like in the same geographic region and they can choose to meet up on a campus, for example, or at a coffee shop or whatever they'd like to do. By and large, though, I think it's a virtual connection for the mentors and mentees, and then it's really on them to decide how they want to structure it, how they want to build their relationship, build their relationship. We don't do any sort of like traditional, like meetups or kickoff meetings or those sorts of things, because we can't just the way our school is structured.
Jennifer:But we've seen success. I mean we've had. We're in our second year. We aimed to have something like I don't know. We had a very low bar, I think we said like 25 pairs in the first year just to get our feet wet, and we ended up having more than 200 people in our community getting involved. So we called that a win.
Jen:Yes, I would definitely call that a win. Do you do any training for the mentors?
Jennifer:We have a mentor handbook, if you will, on our website, that gives them some general guidance and tips for how to be a mentor handbook, if you will, on our website, that gives them some general guidance and tips for how to be a mentor. We do offer some live sessions if they want to come and learn about. We don't require the mentors to participate in live sessions. We know with our population that that would eliminate a lot of people from participating, just given people's work schedules and lives. So we do provide training that students mentors can opt into. That's great.
Jennifer:We see some taking advantage of that and others who are, like you know, middle-aged executives at companies that are don't need any training from us to mentor a younger student right. So they're able to use their own personal experience of life and life skills, if you will, to help another student in a process. We've had a lot of students actually tap that program who are in dissertation and who get stuck and they say I want a mentor who's written a dissertation or who's like further along in the process than me so that they can like pump me up and help me, like keep moving. That half the battle with the dissertation is just continuing to make progress and the way our school is structured. You know students really do work a lot on their own and some students can get lost in that process. So we've seen that as a unexpected but pleasant outcome of that program, where we're able to see some students make good progress on their dissertations because of the support they're getting from their mentor, which is kind of cool.
Jen:Yeah, that's wonderful because that is a lonely task writing a dissertation, so if you can surround yourself with support, that's fantastic. So the mentorship program seems to have resonated both with students and with the people who want to be mentors. Are there other programs that you find are resonating with students as well?
Jennifer:We have a. We launched a last lecture series. You're probably familiar with the Randy Pausch last lecture at Carnegie Mellon. We sort of borrowed that idea and modified it for our setting and have a last lecture series at our school. While we don't if you know about the last lecture series from Prana E-Mail-In, you know Dr Pouch was facing a terminal illness and sort of delivered his last lecture under that umbrella.
Jennifer:Our last lecturers are not facing terminal illnesses but rather they are sort of using the platform as a way to talk about their own first-gen experience and share their wisdom. We actually just had one yesterday from a faculty member at our institution and it was so inspiring just talking about she's a first generation American, first-gen college student, first in her family to get any college degree, let alone she has her from our school and just talk, talking about the roadblocks that she encountered and how she overcame them and, you know, giving great bits of wisdom and tips to our students about persistence and how to, you know, understand your changing relationship with your family of origin. In this case, the faculty member is her parents came to the US from Mexico when they were young people and she talked a lot about sort of being a first born in the US S, mexican American, and how her relationship with her T, as in T O's, is different than her sibling, who didn't go to college, and she's okay with that because they all. She described it as um, they're all sort of the colors of the rainbow, so she has the different people in her life who feel different needs, just like different colors make up the rainbow, which was really cool. We'll post that on our website as soon as we have a chance to, you know, get it in presentable shape.
Jennifer:So we have that series that we get some good traction in. We have a faculty and staff directory that people at the institution can, who work here, can voluntarily join and just share information about their background. They can either identify as first gen or as a first gen ally and the student can go search that directory and, you know, reach out to a faculty member, a staff member who maybe they share other identities with, and just say, hey, can I meet with you, can I talk to you? Can you help me understand even like a school policy or a procedure? Or you know, students have lots of places they can go to get information about things like enrollment etc. Yeah, sometimes it's nice to have a different type of connection with someone at the school, so we see some students using that yeah, and it's more organic that way.
Jen:if the student is reaching out, yeah, 100%.
Jennifer:And then we do, like many, many schools around the country, a celebration of first gen-ness in the fall around National First Gen Day.
Jen:Great.
Jennifer:So we'll do a variety of activities and programs and we are challenged as I think more and more schools are, as more and more students choose virtual education to make our programs accessible to students who don't come to campus and aren't gonna come to campus they don't even live within, you know, a thousand miles of a campus, so all of our activities are online. So so we do. We'll have a virtual art show this fall just kind of cool it's like, and students are so creative and they'll create art pieces and share them on our blog or on our instagram page. We use social media a lot to talk to students in our population about first gen programs. We We'll have trivia night virtual trivia night.
Jennifer:We'll host a book club that will be held just like this on Zoom, and then actually during first gen week this year, our president is going to deliver a laugh lecture. She's first gen and she's agreed to be our featured speaker this year for our first gen week. That's fantastic. Yeah, really kind of like going as far as we can to get to the top of the organization, and that buy in and engagement is so important to the program's success. So we're excited to hear what she'll have to share with our students and faculty about. You know her own experience and the lessons that she's learned as a first-gen person.
Jen:Yeah, what have been some of the challenges in setting all this up? For example, you said you used all your grant money that first year for the cords. Did you get additional grant money Like? Was the buy-in higher from the institution Like? Talk more about some of those challenges and also where you found the support you needed.
Jennifer:Yeah, great. Another great question. No, unfortunately not. We did not get any more grant funding. We had to find the money in our other budget to, you know, move some things around. We have a sort of a central student affairs bucket that we pull funds out of to pay for all different kinds of programs and every year we have to evaluate where we want to spend those resources, you know, and how we, where we think we can get sort of the highest return on our investment and where we see the greatest student need is. We have been able to procure some small funds here and there from, for example, that our institutional strategic plan has a budget and I asked for some money to help pay for first gen week last year. So we were able to get some small contributions there. We of course looked at outside resources and we've had. We. We won a COE NASPA grant a couple of years ago to help fund our first gen week. Yeah, so we've gotten some, I guess. Yes, we have gotten some little funding, but no hard dollars.
Jen:Okay, no permanent hard dollars. No, not personally Okay.
Jennifer:On my wish list is a director, right Somebody to run this program Right now it's managed by our office team and we are a small team. Have we wear many hats, as I'm sure many of your listeners do, because that seems to be the way of the world in student affairs Small but mighty. I mean something. I'll be candid. It's difficult. The funds are limited and we could spend, you know, 10 times what we spend on this program if we had unlimited funds. We have to be strategic and know that we want to maintain our core offerings and then see where we can look around to find other resources as we want to grow specific arms of the program as well. I think that the dedicating the staff time is challenging.
Jennifer:We do have a advisory board comprised of faculty and staff and students at the institution that meets monthly and we lean a lot on the interest and engagement and generosity that people on that group bring in terms of their time and we because it's voluntary, I mean people show up out of their own interest and they also help us, you know, get the word out and get student engagement in our setting and, I think, broadly. It seems these days it can be tough to get students attention. You know, back in the day when I was in graduate school or even in early in my career, it was the like buy a pizza, they will come, sort of thing. And that's just not reality anymore for our students. They're very busy people, they have jobs. There's a lot of distractions in our lives that can pick up our time. So we do have to be very strategic and thoughtful about where we show up and how we show up and what we offer to students to. You know, get their attention for a few minutes and talk to them about school resources.
Jen:Yeah, and it's, and it's made more complicated because you have several schools in different time zones where and virtual students. So it's, it's. It's just a like a higher degree of difficulty to use, maybe like gymnastics and figure skating terms.
Jennifer:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like that analogy. I'm going to use that.
Jen:Okay, All right, See, that's why it's great about having these conversations. It's like, oh, that's, I got that idea. I'm stealing that, I'm writing that down. Um, so my my last well, not my real last question, but my semi last question is um, how do you know your program is successful? Do you get to do any kinds of assessment to see what people are saying? Besides the, obviously the advisory board is giving you some good feedback.
Jennifer:Yeah, I think, uh, numbers of engagement. So we certainly look at numbers, while I am not a believer that people just being present is a measure of success, because we don't know what they're walking away with, we were really thrilled to have such a high level interest in our mentorship program. In particular, we do an assessment of that program with participants at the end of their two semester commitment. Well, we do like a pre-test, post-test assessment. So we administer assessment when they come in and then we administer the same assessment on their way out as well. Some qualitative data collection, sort of what worked, what didn't, what did you like, what can we change, how could it be better? And that's something that we do every cycle with that program. We don't have a way necessarily to measure the effectiveness of, like, an honor cord program per se, as much as we see it present in the space at commencement. But we aren't necessarily doing any sort of follow up with students who wear a cord, for example, to find out the significance of, you know, receiving that gift from the institution.
Jennifer:I don't even know how we would do that. Yeah, that might be hard to quantify, that's beyond my comprehension. I know they're getting passed out because I see them being worn and I keep getting the request to buy more. So I know that they're. I know they're being used. That's awesome. I know they're being used, that's awesome.
Jennifer:We do, of course, use our advisory group for sort of ongoing feedback on the program what's working, what's not. We're fortunate to have a core group of faculty who come to that advisory group, many of whom teach our undergrads, which is a smaller population for us but has an even higher first gen percentage. So we're 60%. We're actually like 59 and a half, so I'm being generous by saying 60. Our undergrads last I look I think it was like 72% were first gen.
Jennifer:So the majority of students and high need, you know these are students who've gone to school at a number of different places, sort of swirled around, collected credits or trying to finish a degree. So we're fortunate to have a couple of I'm thinking of a couple of faculty in particular who will do things like post things in their Canvas course, post things in their program home on. You know, most programs have a hub on Canvas that students use for information. They'll post information about what's happening in the first gen program, where opportunities for, you know, networking are bubbling up.
Jennifer:We do have a first gen club that has been historically for undergraduate students that this year will expand to include graduate students for undergraduate students. That this year will expand to include graduate students. We didn't think graduate students would want a club like they wouldn't necessarily want to go to a club meeting. But we've had several come forward to ask for that space and community, even though it'll be a virtual community just like this. So we're going to try it and we'll see if who shows up and what the outcomes are.
Jen:Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that because because give it a try and and just wait and see if, if you know you get, you get some people. I think is, as you said, it's not just numbers that's important, it's how students engage in, what they take away. And yeah, and so five students you know show up and they get to form a community. That's that's.
Jennifer:that's a good thing. Yeah, we also have tried to be really strategic about partnering with other departments at the institution, like, we believe that anything we do for our first gen students benefits all of our students. So we did, for example, a project on Instagram a couple of years back about school acronyms things that, like you and I use in our everyday work lives and we know what we mean when we say them and we know who's in charge of that thing that we just talked about and we know how to get a problem fixed if there's a problem with that weird acronym place. Our students don't know what we're talking about, like they don't, so we did a whole series of instagram story, or not stories. See, you can tell that I'm clearly not the one running the instagram channel. It's our student employees who do it.
Jennifer:oh, yes, I'm totally with you on that, yeah but uh, we believe that you know, like demystifying what we mean when we say SAP for a first-gen student helps a continuing-gen student just as much. Right, it's not like it's secret or we don't, we're not trying to withhold information. So we've tried to be strategic about partnering with other offices and getting them engaged in our programming and knowing that there are other programs that are trying to target these same students in terms of support. So, like we have a McNair program at the Chicago school you're probably familiar with the McNair program. It's actually in our office, in the office of the dean.
Jennifer:So we work hand in glove with our McNair leader and with the students in that program. We have student advisors, you know, who work under our enrollment management umbrella and we work. You know we're neighbors with those folks, so we work closely with them to get them the information they might need. To slip into a conversation with a student about resources, you know, when they're trying to troubleshoot an enrollment problem, for example, they're just trying to partner up, you know, and like work, like all rowing in the same direction. To use a nautical reference.
Jen:Yes, oh yes, I like no. I think that's a good, because it'd be easy to not or to inundate students with all the different things that they could be doing, and so it's just splintered versus a cohesive whole.
Jennifer:So yeah, and I'm not. I wouldn't say it's perfect, but we sure are trying to present unified messaging, unified coordinated communication to students, because they do tend to tune out if it becomes too much or too disjointed or if they've got to, like, figure out how to thread stuff together themselves.
Jen:Yeah.
Jennifer:So always room to improve, but I think you know doing our best to be integrated in an intentional way.
Jen:Yeah, that's, that's fantastic. Final question is what would you recommend for someone who's listening to do first, if they were wanted to start a virtual program for their grad students?
Jennifer:Yeah, I think, find a partner or somebody at the institution who can be a thought partner for you, and that may be just a Jennifer preference, more than any sort of like professional guidance. I just I think, working in higher ed all these years, I have learned that you know where we can collaborate. We're going to likely be more successful and it's just nice to have somebody to work with, to bounce ideas off of and to, you know, try and poke holes in a plan and see where we can improve it. It would be great if that partner is somebody who has the ability to help you, you know, figure out things like funding and how to set up an advisory group and how to get the attention of senior leadership at your institution. Maybe you can do that without them, but if you can present sort of a case together, I think then that might get more attention.
Jen:Yes.
Jennifer:Yes, I think sometimes too, we have a tendency to want it to be perfect before we launch it and it's been my experience that that is an enemy of progress. So know that you're going to make mistakes and that's okay, I hope, in your environment, in my environment, I mean again, we're kind of young when you look at us compared to you know. I mean again, we're kind of young when you look at us compared to you know, the more traditional schools and we try a lot of stuff that doesn't work and we tweak our services and programs based on what we hear from them and if we do something and it's a miserable failure, we pick ourselves up and try something else. So I think, just being willing to take a risk and you know feeling, I hope, like you, have support of your manager and your institution to take those risks, because we don't grow without trying new things.
Jen:Yeah, and you learn. You learn from the times that you stumble. So I totally agree and, as a as a fellow Jennifer, I also agree with finding a thought partner. So I would, I would support that Jennifer theory of getting started with finding Alice at the Jennifer theory. I know, let's, we'll get on that. I have a conference presentation coming up With Finding Allies the Jennifer Theory. I know we'll get on that. I have a conference presentation coming up. Totally. So if people want to find you, if they want more information or they have questions about what you're doing, how can people find you and reach out to you?
Jennifer:Super simple jstripe at thechicagoschooledu or our office email address is studentsuccess at thechicagoschooledu, traditional spelling s-t-u-d-e-n-t-s-u-c-c-s-s. And. We are, like most people, I think, these days, tethered to our computers. So please reach out, give us a shout in email. We'll be happy to even be an external thought partner for you if you're thinking about virtual services and how to sort of take your program to the next level or get it off the ground. To begin with, you gotta start somewhere, so we are also really willing and open to sharing our stuff, so nothing we've created is copyrighted. If you want to look at our mentor materials or our honor cord description in our commencement program, give us a shout and we'll be happy to share that with you, and you're welcome to adapt it for your setting, because we're all in this together to help students be successful.
Jen:So, yes, absolutely, absolutely. Well, thank you so much, jennifer. It was really a pleasure talking with you and I learned some things, I took some notes, it created some ideas for me about things to do, and so thanks again for your time. Absolutely, thank you for the opportunity, thank you for being here with me today, and if you want to get in touch with me, you can find me at Jen that's J-E-N at firstgenfmcom and at my website is firstgenfmcom. I look forward to talking with you again next week and, as always, I love to hear a rating and review and helps other people find the podcast. Thanks so much for today and we'll talk to you next week.