We're gonna do the interview today when is he available today? What times?
In an hour? I'll be there! Alright so the president is available in
one hour because of this conversation I had with him
Can we set up an interview? I'm doing campus vlogs Nathan's job yes
Let's let's go I gotta get ready
I'm just answering your question so you have full responsibility
Oh I've got this great clip - bing - that's me in post putting in the
It moved me yesterday when my thought was absolutely confirmed that students that come to Michigan Tech are special
In the introduction speech you said that Michigan Tech students - what was the phrasing?
It was like that they're in fact special
and I heard you have a good story about your
first sort of interaction with Michigan Tech students
So there was, want to say, near the finalist pool down right and began the negotiations for this position
and while I had grown up part of my life in Michigan and lived in
Northern Illinois and been to Upper Michigan I had never been to the UP
So before I would accept they offer, go much further into the conversations I took a
secret shopper visit up here and nobody knew
so I came up here yeah I mean I had to
try the Ambassador Pizza you know the whole thing and it was like 2 o'clock on
Sunday afternoon I finally got here and got moving around and started to look at
the buildings I walked into library it was packed
I thought wait a minute this is pretty interesting I'm in a university that you
know it's a night it's a Sunday afternoon it's pretty nice out and the
place is packed and there's not an open seat and I thought that's a place I want to be with
We have a lot of students that are very committed to their studies
but they're not afraid to laugh it's a very special place that that doesn't feel odd
I mean don't you sense too that the students have a unique sense of self-confidence
when I helped to move families in here you know during moving day it was
rare for me to move somebody help somebody carry a box that wasn't from
more than 500 miles away what struck me is that you know if you're at
let's say University of Denver there's people from 5 and 700 miles away but a lot of people
from 20 and 30 miles away
here the majority of students are from 500 plus miles away
So you do have to have a certain you know self-confidence
I'm 446 miles away
well then sorry you don't have sorry
Let's go get some coffee
We've done that, I want to ask you about your motorcycle because I've heard you're a motorcycle guy
Yeah this summer I was supposed to if I hadn't done this
job move I was going to take it to Alaska from Louisiana that was the big
plan but that changed when I was coming here instead so I took it
Did you take your motorcycle here?
I did but I took a roundabout way I went back to Arizona
through the Grand Canyon, up through Yosemite and then across South Dakota
Minnesota and finally got here
you've traveled so much wow
so is this just you on the motorcycle?
Just me yeah and my tent you know
So you camp with it too
Well I have good intentions with camping but either it's usually
too hot or too cold so the other part though is to kind of see America
because I never take the Express ways always kind of the back roads to go into
smaller towns and through that way so you get a really good sense of what makes our country special
Alright so this is that's the thing fully loaded up on the truck
Oh man! That's really yeah Wow
It's in the garage now
Yeah cause it's snowing now
I got to get a snowmobile now
Yeah oh yeah you do!
But that'll be the winter thing
So it's two o'clock on a Tuesday and the library is slam
packed this is exactly what you're talking about the Michigan Tech
motivation but did you notice out there that everybody was like smiling
I'm sure we got it on the camera but like nobody was nobody was mad about
spending their time in here
things that strike you is that when we were walking in right
there were faculty and staff here I mean they were relaxing obviously
in the cafe but they were here mingling with the students right
That's true
The fact that it's a community spirit it's a community it's really community
I have this really great professor who is very innovative in what he does
He lets us use our phone and apps in class during exams he lets us use MATLAB on our phone
and I was wondering what you thought about that
Good for him he's trying new things, being creative it's that kind of innovation in the way you teach
is what will help keep you at the forefront as a student
Then you have faculty they're gonna try and do different things like that
We have such a great group of people here that work here
I think part of Michigan Tech is that like everybody's here to help each other
because we all have to brave the Keweenaw
so everybody kind of works together and it kind of creates this really
collaborative atmosphere and I think that translates really well to the
faculty so I'm glad that you mentioned that because you can ask anybody here for help
So I asked you earlier I kind of want to talk about - we'll talk about it more when we get there
Fourth Industrial Revolution is that what I said last time?
What's your definition of the Fourth Industrial Revolution for those who don't know?
It's a term that we use to kind of encapsulate all the changes that you see
happening and there's really like five driving forces that people have identified
the first is that there's sensors everywhere right I mean from
what you buy, to what you eat, your credit cards, your car, your cell phone
everything all this data is being collected that's number one so we have
all that information number two is that we're able to store and process that big
data I mean the amount of information available is nearly infinite now so
we have we can collect all that information we can store all that
information the number three is it's all networked I mean your refrigerator's networked to
your lights to your phone, the internet of things, but everything is interconnected right
and not only that when you get to the fourth piece you have machine learning
growing at an exponential rate so it's not just what we know but we're able to
process that and create new knowledge in a way that we haven't been able to do
before because of computational power that's the fourth piece and the fifth
piece goes back to what I indicated about the people as all of that is going to
impact our entire social fabric already impacted how you and I interact with one
another by sending texts from the old days right all the way through how
our political system I mean look at Bitcoin it's impacting the economic system
the political systems the social systems in ways that we haven't seen in
you know a long time ago in history so those five things are all interestingly
converging simultaneously on you as a student and so it's so exciting for me
is that students with the character of those at Michigan Tech will be the
leaders to help our society move forward in that way
Those are great answers, did you prepare for this?
No, that's just the truth