It's incredibly crucial for students to have hands-on learning so that when they graduate they're ready for the real world, and that is our biggest priority and it's through that hands-on learning that we prepare them to do well at jobs.

We not only use real world examples in the lecture, but during the labs we go outside and we're in this amazing Living Laboratory with the lake right on the campus. We go out to the lake and actually catch wild microbes, and then we keep that year to year and we compare the results of what's living in the lake. Year after year, that goes back now decades, so it's also a long term environmental change monitoring project, all right there in your first semester of Intro to Bio.

So, students can get involved in research projects in a variety of ways here at Paul Smith's, and I think students who want to have a research experience can. And so one example would be working with the staff of the Ausable River Association and using a technique called environmental DNA detection, which we developed, to detect the presence of fishes in stream systems through a single water sample. Since we don't have graduate students in the natural sciences, our undergraduate students become our colleagues and our research partners.

The experiences we give here at Paul Smith's College really help you get into graduate school or get that job with a consulting firm. So that's something that I think we do better than anybody else.