The faculty at Eastern are here for the students. We've all chosen to be here to teach undergraduate students. We spend a lot of time in the classroom and with other high impact practices, so our focus really is on mentoring students in our disciplines. Because we're a small liberal arts university, each faculty member has a discipline of their own and their training. So that allows us to provide a diversity of opportunities to students in terms of content and sub discipline areas of knowledge. And we have made a specific effort in order to recruit and maintain faculty from very diverse backgrounds that would reflect our student body.

Faculty gives back to the community in a number of ways. Here at Eastern we have the Center for Community Engagement, which often many faculty use as a connection to a broader community, both within the town of Windham-Willimantic, and also engaging the community, working with the community, inviting the community back to the university. There's so many ways that we reach out. Really, community as part of who we are. Each discipline here has their own method of hands on learning, and it's a very important aspect of what we do here at Eastern.

The biggest thing for me is, I tend to show them that what they learn in class, they can apply somewhere else. For example, what I do is I invite speakers via Skype. For example, last semester, I invited this farmer from Iowa. Some of the questions were, how do I use my economics in farming? Why did you choose farming, yet you did business? The idea is to show that what I learned in economics, or what I learned in business, or what I learned in school, can apply to any field. It doesn't have to apply to the field that I have a degree in. You can use so many things that you learn in class to apply to any specific area.