eso I've actually had a very man during career path, and none of it was really planned. I haven't undergrad degree in music composition, and when I graduated, I loved to compose, but I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And I always kind of joked that I didn't want to be that starving artists. So I got the green what I wanted, but I was looking for other paths. So at the time I was living abroad in Australia and I was looking for jobs back in the United States and was looking at institutions of higher education. And there was a position open in financial aid. And one time I thought, Well, this is really interesting. I've always had a passion for budgeting, for financial responsibility for student debt. And so I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to use my own passions to help graduate students figure out how toe get through graduate school in a financially responsible way. So I took the job, I got the job, which was which was, um, exciting, considering it didn't have any background in this, and that was what really propelled my career in higher education. Um, so I worked for almost a decade in financial aid, just moving through different institutions in different positions. And then I was working for a school and, um, the college I worked for did as, ah, university strength finders. Two point. Oh, that which is kind of, Ah, an assessment tool that looks at your strength. And I was talking to a friend of mine about my strength, and she said, Cherif, you should be a major gift officer And I said, I don't know what you're talking about and she said, Advancement in the fundraising arm of the institution, your strength really align itself well to this. I said, Oh, my goodness, You mean I can get paid to do this kind of job? And that was a very key turning point in my career where it had been something that I was interested in tow all of a sudden, something that I was working toward. Um, so at that point, I was recruited to move to the financial aid office at the University of Rochester, and while there I started my master's program in higher administration, and my first class I took with strategies of fundraising. And I thought, If I like this class, maybe I'll look at pursuing that well, long story short. I I loved it, absolutely loved it. And so I started looking at positions within the U of r and advancement. Um, I got it. So I started working for the School of Arts and Sciences in the Humanities, which was aligned with with my degree and my expertise, end up and and did that for a few years and thought it was amazing. And then kind of that next big. When you talk about incidents or experiences that shape your career, one came up completely unexpected. One of the alums that I had been working with from ah, from a fundraising perspective, I asked to have lunch, and he asked me if I would like Teoh join his company as the head of business development for a new product he was watching, which wasn't anything I considered. But my goal has always been if a door is opening that unless there's a reason not to, I should walk through it. So I left high Red after completing my masters and went and worked for the company for a year, and I learned a really important lesson that, um not everything is the right fit. I learned a lot of really great skills that year, but it definitely was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So then the provost of the University of Rochester was was creating a new position that was really the link between alumni but companies and research and trying to figure out how all these pieces go together. Since things have been done very kind of departmental e before and recruited me to come back. And so I realized that that experience in in business development ended up being crude, critical to understanding how companies work and forming more relationships between companies and universities. And so that role is the role I'm in now, which is which is really more of, ah, a connector role. So how do I connect external organizations with the university? But even more so, it's morphed into how do we connect different departments within the university that are doing similar things to each other? So So yeah, that's ah, kind of blinding way. But again, definitely some things in there that that were that were very pinpointed to be need Ah, big move in one direction

responsibilities. Air Very interesting, because I almost hold two very different jobs in one. So when I first started the job, my responsibilities included a lot of travel. Prep. A lot of outreach to, um, research departments within organisations to set up meetings for our provost and our senior vice president for research to try to open those doors as well as as well as working with our internal departments to figure out what relationships we already had. It companies, um, I traveled, I'd say, 50% of the time. Um, I traveled. I'm average every other week. What senior leadership, Um, putting all the trips together, going making sure that we were discussing the right things, really leading those conversations and then on coming back, making sure that all the follow up was done and all the connections to the department's on campus that might then take over That relationship happened and nature that they had the momentum. Now it's very much, especially in during Cove it it's become a very internal role. So, through the course of trying to put these relationships together, realize that the university's data quality was very poor. We had people just tracking very similar types of data, sometimes out skate sticky notes. Sometimes on Google box, people was keeping spreadsheets, but nobody sharing their data with each other. So I made a pitch to really pivot my role into being much more data oriented and so trying to centralize our data functions. For anyone who deals with any kind of external relationships, though it might be companies. But it could be other institutions that could be, um, government organised affiliations, things like that. So what? So that first of all our senior leadership can go toe one place and really get a single picture of what our relationships are, the facets of our relationships with one organization, Um and then the rest of that is, and then just trying to do the data quality work in making sure that we've got good data. So now I don't travel it all. Everything I do is

um well, for as far as a crm were using Salesforce. And so I think any CRM, um, is useful in a role like this. I've actually gone gone. I'm doing most of our development work in house. So one of the skills that I've been learning is is coating. So, um, something I never learned in high school or college. And I'm I realized about a year ago that those would be important skills. So I've been working a lot in Sequel and Python. Uh, first of all, it's just good for me to know it's open a lot of doors with how I communicate with our data silence, interns and our data scientists. So when they're talking to me and tech lingo, I'm not just, you know, I Acto understand what they're talking about, how they're trying to join tables, and the goal is that eventually I'll be able to do some of that work myself.