Dream Big and Follow Your Passion
In this episode of Unstoppable Stories, host Nathan James sits down with Kevin Finkelstein, a theater historian and UMGC alumnus. Kevin shares his lifelong passion for the arts, sparked at a young age, and takes us through his unique journey—from high school Shakespearean troupe to a detour into I.T., and ultimately, his path into higher education.
Kevin reflects on his experience at UMGC, where he found the support and foundation to dream big and pursue his passions. He also shares the unforgettable moment of graduation, where the cheering crowd for every graduate left a lasting impact. If you're considering continuing your education but unsure how to make it happen, tune in to hear Kevin’s inspiring story and insights!
Episode Information
Kevin Finkelstein:
What I've come to discover is that it's the power of storytelling, and we have so many different mediums for storytelling, which is wonderful, right? That's fantastic. Today, more than ever. I love film, I love making films, I love television, but you can keep doing it until you get it right. Theater's not like that.
We rehearse, we create a production. We decide what we're going to do, but every night it's a different show. And because it's live, there's a special energy that's attached to it. Welcome to the
Intro:
UMGC podcast, unstoppable stories with your host, Nathan James.
Nathan James:
Hello everyone. Uh, it is good to see you. Um, I am here with Kevin.
Finkelstein. He is a theater historian. He has graduated from UMGC and he's also a current graduate student. And he is here with us today. Kevin, thanks for being here. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Oh, that's great. Great. Really appreciate you being on. Look, so. Let's jump in. I believe you're from, uh, the DMV area, DC, Maryland, Virginia area, but you're out in Colorado now.
I am. Boulder, Colorado. How's it, how's it going
Kevin Finkelstein:
Out there? It's going amazing. And it's the next step in this journey that I started in first grid of working in theater. Uh, I couldn't be happier to be out here doing this work, being with these students, and really having the opportunity to sort of mold and shape the next generation of actors.
Nathan James:
No, that's a big deal. Yeah. I was going to ask. You know, what took you out there and, uh,
Kevin Finkelstein:
It's research. So I did, I will talk a little bit later, I'm sure about the undergraduate process, but coming out to Colorado, uh, there's a, the university of Colorado Boulder has a theater and dance department masters and PhD program, uh, that focuses on research, theater history and performance research.
And so my research focuses on the intersection of. Civic engagement, classical text, and disability performance, specifically hard of hearing and deaf actors. And so, what we're looking at and what we're talking about with that is really integrated performance, where theater practitioners that are not just hearing and not just deaf or hard of hearing, but from both sides of the spectrum.
All sides of the spectrum come together to create a production. The most recent obvious example of this, there's a company out in Los Angeles, California called Deaf West, and they did a massive production of Spring Awakening a couple of years ago that was on Broadway. It had deaf actors and hearing actors.
All side by side. It was a phenomenon and it really brought integrated theater to the forefront. It's very exciting time. And so that was when I knew this was something that I needed to be able to research and focus on because it's such an emerging field right now. That's great
Nathan James:
Theater. Right. So, I mean, you're a theater historian, obviously this is what you're studying.
Tell us about how'd you, take us back. Okay. How did you get
Kevin Finkelstein:
Into theater? Everybody's got a different story. Everybody has a different story. So I'm going to go all the way back to first grade. I was in a Hebrew day school in Montgomery County, Maryland, and we were doing a production of the wizard of Oz and I was cast as the mayor of Munchkin city.
I was very excited. Right. I was a first grader. I had two lines. Right. Right. That's fine. My mother, uh, found this emerald green tuxedo for me that was so big. So we stuffed a pillow under the shirt and then I needed a top hat, but nobody anywhere is going to have a green top hat. This is, I don't know, 1983, 1984.
So she made one out of cardboard. All right. This is, again, an elementary school, so there is one performance. You get it right, or you get it wrong. There's no fixing it later. And I am, my job is to walk across the stage, sing my two lines, stand on the side of the stage for a little while, and then leave.
That's all that I have to do. So I start, I'm walking across the stage, and I'm singing my lines, and my hat flies off of my head and lands, honest to God, in the chuba, in the pit. Like in the big opening of the tuba. And I look at the hat and I have this second of like, should I do this or should I just keep going?
And I decided to keep going. Just ignore the hat. I finished the scene. I go off stage. The rest of the play goes. Everything is fine. Afterwards, I think this is like a day or two later. Uh, the director of that piece, the teacher who had directed it, came up to me and said, listen, I just want you to know you had this instinct on stage to ignore the hat and to keep walking.
And that was a really, really smart instinct. I've worked with adults who wouldn't have had that instinct. And it's a little. First grade me. Oh, my God. That means I'm supposed to do this
Nathan James:
Natural talent.
Kevin Finkelstein:
And so I've been doing it ever since.
Nathan James:
Look,
Kevin Finkelstein:
I got to high school and I went to high school in Montgomery County, Maryland, Springbrook High School.
Uh, and we had a drama club and we had a Shakespearean troop. And the Shakespearean troop was really much more focused on the craft of acting as opposed to the drama club, which was about, we're putting on shows and you're going to move here and you're going to move there. Um, it really spoke to me. And so I started working with Shakespeare in high school.
I finagled my way into an internship that I made the Shakespeare theater create for me. Uh, and I've been working with his text and in theater as a director, an actor, a producer, a playwright ever since. No kidding. So you've talked
Nathan James:
About in high school, um, having, I think there's a particular acting coach, uh, that was.
Pivotal for you and inspiring you on this journey with Shakespeare in theater. Could you talk more about that? I mean, because it really does. I can hear the passion in your voice for theater. Um, I like it, right? Uh, I think the old English aspect of Shakespeare kind of got to me a little bit back then, but for you, you dove right in.
You're on fire for it. Talk to us a little bit about how that fire got lit, especially from that, from that coach that you had in high school.
Kevin Finkelstein:
It's hard, right? So the coach is, uh, her name is Liv Excelio, and she did her training at Oxford. She was an AP English teacher in the, on, in the school, and she had the Shakespearean troupe.
And so we did two things every year. We would perform on the stage of the Folger Shakespeare Library in downtown DC, which is a, like, I'm, I'm just a, a, a historic and super well known theater. Every year, the Folger Library would have something called the Student Shakespeare Festival, which they would invite campuses from across the world to come and perform, from all levels of performance, not just performing art schools, not just high schools, we had elementary schools, we have private schools, public schools, the works.
So every day you'd have about eight to 10 schools that you were there with, and each school would get to perform something that was 28 to 32 minutes that involved Shakespeare. It didn't have to be a full play. It could be a full play. It was only 32 minutes, so it could be scenes from a play. It could be a section of a play.
It could be multiple plays. What we did. And the thing that really impressed me so much as a kid was my coach would take. Let's say six scenes and she would find some sort of common theme throughout all of those scenes and then she would write iambic Pentameter dialogue to stitch those scenes together and turn it into one full piece now I am a pentameter is a type of poetry.
It's a specific meter And a specific cadence, number of syllables, where the accents go, all that is very, very specific. It's really hard for us to do now. It was very hard to do for Shakespeare's time. Sure. Right? And she would just, she would just do it. She would just write these lines that were Not Shakespeare's lines, but felt like Shakespeare.
And it wound up creating a full story. And I was so impressed. The second thing that we did was a dinner theater every, every year where the students in the troop would, uh, something between 25 and 30 total scenes that we would perform for the families who bought tickets. We'd come to see it. We would cook food for them and serve them food and do this dinner in the cafeteria of the high school.
And we were getting opportunities that. Nobody else was getting it. I don't think I appreciated that until I got to my undergrad, when I started my undergrad at the university of Miami, and I started talking to other people from around the country who were from very different places and had very different experiences with theater coming into this.
I found that I was very fortunate because I came from a very. affluent county in Maryland that had the resources to donate to all of these different clubs. There were something like 2,100 kids in my high school and they came, it was a very diverse school. It was something, my class was something like 33 percent white, 35 percent BIPOC, 18 percent Hispanic and then everybody else.
Uh, and having that shared experience, that, that sort of feeling of we are all a community. I've informed as much of how I love and do theater as the coach, who is just somebody who up until she passed was a such an important person in my life. That's a big deal. We're going to get
Nathan James:
To basically what your journey looked like right after high school in a second, right?
Um. You've talked about there being a certain wonder and a certain power of theater, like, and a certain influence on the audience. Could you talk a little bit about that, how you came to know that power, uh, as far as what's like to act and project that on the audience?
Kevin Finkelstein:
Sure. What I've come to discover is that it's the power of storytelling.
It's the, and we have so many different mediums for storytelling, which is wonderful, right? That's fantastic. Today, more than ever. Uh, unless it gets. We've got a TikTok, right? And you've got store people doing short little stories on TikTok. You've got people who are doing, uh, social media threads that are writing out stories.
You've got wattpad where you're telling narrative stories to people. You're not selling it to them. You're just giving them that story, film, television, theater, all of these different mediums of storytelling that let you feel something differently because they each speak to people different. The power theater is that it's alive, right?
I love film. I love making films. I love television. I like making web series, but. You can keep doing it until you get it right. So the people who are watching a product like a film or a television or even a novel, you're seeing the end product after all of the, everybody has said, yes, this is what it's going to be.
Theater's not like that. We rehearse, we create a production, we decide what we're going to do, but every night it's a different show. Every night, somebody might not be feeling the same way. The audience might be louder or quieter. There might be something that goes on with a light that breaks. Somebody might jump a line and that changes in the interaction in the scene.
All of this is the power of live theater. And because it's live, there's a special energy that's attached to it. You go to see a movie in a movie theater, and I think you feel a sort of camaraderie with the people around you. I remember, uh, I think it's the Two Towers where Gandalf returns. And I was, I saw that in a theater and the minute that he came out on screen, everybody started to cheer.
It was this big communal, like this is the moment we're waiting for and it's awesome and we'd love that it happened. That's amazing. But that doesn't often happen in film, right? It happens all the time in theater. It's a communal experience. The energy of the audience, the energy of the stage, how those combine and what that brings out to the people who are watching, it can be a very transformative process.
That's,
Nathan James:
And I've felt it. I remember being in a theater for Two Towers when Gandalf appears on the mountain, right, to save them, and comes plunging down the hill with his army behind him and yes, we were all Very excited, right? We were like a big family.
Kevin Finkelstein:
We knew each other. Part of that excitement, I think, is because we know that story.
So we know that that moment is coming. And I think if we're going to take this back to Shakespeare, and we can, then I think part of the joy of watching the interpretations of Shakespeare that happen on different stages is that we do know the story. We know the plaque of the play. What's interesting is how do we interpret that for an audience today, because the people watching Macbeth, and it's, you know, 15 whatever, are not taking the same things away from the story as somebody who produces Macbeth today for an audience today.
Nathan James:
That makes sense. You graduated from high school, right? Uh, I think you went right to college right after that. I did. For about two years, is that what it was? I did.
Kevin Finkelstein:
So I graduated high school in 95 and The conventional wisdom at the time, what our guidance counselors were telling us is that, yeah, you could take a gap year, but you really should just go straight to college.
And it was almost like you didn't have a choice. Of course you had a choice, but you had adults telling you, this is what you should be doing. This is what you should be doing. And so I did, I applied to a bunch of different places, including the university of Maryland, university of Miami gave me the most money.
And it had a program, a BFA program had just invested a ton of money into rebuilding the theater on campus. And so I thought. Well, that's great. It's a program that is actively growing, right? The class before I started was a class of six. The class that I started in was a class of 27. So there was a lot of resources being thrown at the program.
And I felt like that was a good place for me to be. And it was. Until we ran out of money. And it's the very obvious conversation that you have whenever you're talking about higher education, but when you're specifically talking about private schools, like the university of Miami, Florida, cost is a big thing and every year the loans would go up, the grants would go down, the overall funding would go down and the overall costs would go up and there's a point where it's just, you can't mortgage your entire future for this.
Nathan James:
Sure. Right. So that would, so that explains why you were there for what, a couple of years and then that was it. Okay, that makes sense. So after that, right? Um, I mean, eventually you come over to UMGC. Um, happy to have you. Wonderful to have you actually. But there was a bit of a journey before that, right?
And I think professionally for you to talk a little bit about that. I think, well, I believe you were working actually in theater and in it during that time before you even came to UMGC. That's what was that like? That sounds fun.
Kevin Finkelstein:
It's, it's different. Um, so. Everybody who does theater in some capacity, unless you were attached to one of the few big houses in the country where you can get a stable paycheck for a steady job day to day.
Uh, most people that do theater have some sort of supplemental income that comes with it. Actors, especially, it's just so difficult. If you can be an equity actor, a union actor, which means you're guaranteed certain pay rates and certain health insurance benefits and so on and so forth and still make it.
Very difficult to find work that actually pays right? That's the difficulty. So for me, when I left the University of Miami, I stayed in Miami for a couple of years working in professional houses and getting a lay of what this land down here was like before coming back up to the Maryland area. And back in the Maryland area, I wasn't sure I was at this crossroads.
I had no idea what I was going to do. And I decided I needed to get a job. I needed to start, you know, I needed to pay rent. I needed to do things. Uh, and I started working for a government contractor that, uh, I worked exclusively with the department of education to do peer grant reviews. And over this time I've developed database skills, IT skills.
So that by 2008, give or take, I was working in for nonprofits in DC during the day as a database administrator and a meeting planner, and then in the evenings I was self producing theater. Or I was directing theater for another person's company or in a show for somebody else's company. Now, the hard part about this entire time is I started losing my hearing at the same time.
So when I started getting back into theater, I started doing acting, but I found it to be very difficult because a lot of theaters have no infrastructure in place to work with those that are hard of hearing or deaf, especially back in the early 2000s. And so I shifted my focus away. From acting and into directing.
I've got, and I found that I had a, a natural aptitude to be able to do that. I had a, the ability to envision a show from what's on the page to what's going to be on that stage. And because I had the background as an actor, I knew how to talk to other actors as a director to get the outcome that I'm looking for without saying, this is what I want you to do, because in a healthy theater environment, you will never say to somebody, this is what I want you to do.
You will. Guide them to where the two of you will figure out what that piece looks like. So it's a very collaborative type thing.
Nathan James:
That makes sense. You're a guide and you're coming alongside. Right. Right. Right. I hope you like the rhyme there. Yeah,
Kevin Finkelstein:
I like
Nathan James:
That. That's good.
Kevin Finkelstein: But that's exactly what it is.
It's the director. You come up with the concept for the show, right? So I'm gonna do, uh, Romeo and Juliet, and I'm gonna set it in Orange County, California, in the 1990s. That's my concept. But then everybody involved in that show, the actors get to figure out who are their characters in this world. I've created the world.
They're creating the characters. And it was so much more fun to create the world than it was to create the characters,
Nathan James:
For me.
Kevin Finkelstein:
That's powerful.
Nathan James:
During this time, right, before you even come to UMGC, um, during this time where you're working in IT, but you're still finding that way to keep your passion going with the evenings.
You're directing, not just acting. That's something else. Okay. And I'm playwriting. And playwriting. And producing. Look at that. I really love the reimagination aspect of what you said, the power of creation. So you're doing that. When did you know? Because at that point, it sounds like you're doing quite well for yourself, but you knew it was time to restart your education journey.
That's when you came over to us.
Kevin Finkelstein:
How did you know? Back in 2017, I had a conversation with my partner, Jennifer, where I was sort of at a crossroads of the IT work that I was doing and the day work that I was doing was starting to not feel fulfilling. Not feel rewarding. It was important, but it wasn't nourishing the soul.
I know that sounds trite, but it's a very accurate way to describe what I was feeling in the moment. And we had a discussion about, I think I am at a point in my career where I would love to do this full time. And I would like to teach it. I would like to get away from the day work. I would like to get into something that is more focused on the things that make me happy.
But in order to do the grad school step that I need to get to. I still have an undergraduate degree that needs to get finished. I had some credits from the University of Miami. I had done a brief restart at a, uh, at a campus in Kansas because I knew the, uh, the president of that campus, but it wasn't a good fit in terms of technology where they were at their time.
I got really turned off with distance learning because that experience was not something that was, that I felt was right for me. You're working,
Nathan James:
Right? You're juggling two jobs, you're working, you're going to school, you set this ambitious goal of 4. 0, and you accomplished that. What went into that? How did you, not just achieve the degree, but with that level of excellence, with all that multitasking?
Kevin Finkelstein:
You have a plan. You think things through, right? So I know that this is going to be a multi year project, right? Which means that I can, I don't have something on the other end that like, this is a hard deadline that I have to stop. What I have is the sooner that this is done, the sooner I can move on to the next step.
And so that then comes into planning. How many credits did UMGC accept from my previous institutions? Great. This is how much I have left. How can I stagger that out? In a way that allows me to focus on the content to achieve the outcomes of the courses, but not shortchange anything else in my life, either of my jobs, my partner, or this class, these classes, right?
That's what it takes. So distance learning is wonderful because it, yet UMGC, you really get the opportunity to work on your schedule. Right. I had one class in my entire, uh, undergraduate UMGC career that was a hybrid. Everything else was, and that was by choice, and everything else was a distance learning class, an asynchronous class where we were not meeting at a specific time, but we had assignments due every week at certain times.
And so because of that, because I could build my own schedule, because I could say, these are the time blocks that I'm able to reserve to do the homework, to do the readings, to do the writing, whatever. The classes need, I could make it work because I wasn't trying to do too much. And I was trying to stay within the capacity of what I'm capable of doing.
I'm a smart guy, but I also can't spread myself too thin.
Nathan James:
What would you say were your one or two biggest challenges that you faced to earn your degree?
Kevin Finkelstein:
All right. So the, the first challenge, and this is. Nobody's fault, but it is a reality, is that every degree that's conferred by an institution has a series of requirements in order to achieve that degree.
Certain classes that you must take in order to satisfy the requirements for that degree. And while I was certainly able to use experiential learning to test out of some of those requirements, some of them I still had to take, even if they were in topics that weren't things that I had a lot of previous knowledge in or felt confident in.
Um, those classes were the biggest challenge. It's valuable. That's gonna be what any undergraduate comes across, right? There are gonna be classes that you have challenges with because you're not super comfortable with the material, and all I can tell you is that every time I had a problem, I was able to reach out to either the instructor of the class, and if the instructor of the class wasn't able to solve the problem or refuse to solve the problem or didn't respond, I could go above them to the department, and the department chair would always respond because they cared.
And I think most of the faculty that I worked with at UMGC really tried to prioritize the needs of the students, which is why it was such a good experience. This could have easily just been, let me check it off a box, let me do these classes, get it over with, toss them out, and then I'm done. But it was so much better than that.
There were seven different times in the course of my undergraduate career where an instructor asked me if they could use an assignment that I had turned in as an example in future classes. They don't need to do that. They had examples, we looked at them, even if that's not something that they're going to return to every single course from here on out, it is still such an uplifting thing to hear that the work is good enough that can be used as an example to teach other students.
So while I came into this undergraduate thinking, yes, I'd like to teach, I think by the end of it, I felt like I am already in a really strong position to teach. Uh, and I should take my talents to that.
Nathan James:
Look at that. So earning the degree. Helped bring you clarity on what the next chapter need to look like as far as you actually teaching in the realm of theater Right summarizing that okay.
Yeah, that's powerful. And I think that's a great takeaway I think a lot of times it can be easy for folks to say I'm gonna get the bachelor's degree. It's personal goal Maybe there's a specific career Outcome that I may or may not want we'll see Um, but you learned, it was a self, it was a, it was a journey for you of self exploration to find out what you really wanted to do.
And I think that's one of the best things about getting a degree. It's a journey of self exploration. Not necessarily all external. And so thanks for that, really sharing that. You realize by the end of your degree, uh, with your bachelor's here at UMGC, that teaching was the way to go. Teaching was the way to go.
You got that clarity. So, I think that's what led you to graduate school in Colorado, where you're at right now. Talk to us about what your ultimate goal is, you know, even for your career. What's, where's this all headed for you?
Kevin Finkelstein:
Answering the question is not easy because the ultimate goal crystallizes the more research you do, right?
That's the whole point of grad schools. You come in with an idea of what you want to do, and then as you start diving into it, you start learning more and more. So shortly after getting here, I discovered a book that was published last year. Uh, that's going to be essentially the foundation of my foundational text for my research and put me.
into an understanding of what I was trying to do that I didn't have before. So when I got here, I was really just all about, look, I'm deaf. Deaf performance is important to me. Uh, I ran a theater company that did civic engagement in DC and I ran a theater company that did work classical text in DC. So if I can find a way to combine those three things, like I will be happy for the rest of my life.
One of the things that I tell my students in class is that there is no, Industrial regulation in theater, right? You think about cars or you think about motor oil, or you think about air conditioning units, and there are some sort of like, it has to meet a certain standard. It has to do a certain thing, right?
Theater doesn't have that. Everybody who teaches theater teaches it differently. There's at least nine major acting styles in the United States right now, and none of them are wrong. I think that if there is one place that we can say we're offering workshops, we're offering classes, we're offering texts, we're offering research guides, we're offering help, I, it's going to be a center at a university because that's the only way that this can work.
But that's sort of where I think this is ultimately leading me towards. And I wouldn't have figured that out without everything that came before now.
Nathan James:
Look at that. Yeah, it's evolving. Your mission is evolving. And I love how you said you dream big. I want to dream big, too. I know everybody listening wants to dream big, too.
For our listeners and our viewers, uh, who are on their journeys, right? And, uh, they're facing those challenges to accomplish their goals. Uh, whether it be professional, whether it be academic, whether it be personal. They're encountering those challenges, potentially dealing with some discouragement, right?
What would you have to say based on your journey to them? What advice and insight can you give, can you give us on that?
Kevin Finkelstein:
When you build a house, you start with the foundation, right? You put a big concrete thing in the ground so that everything can be built on top of that concrete thing. If you rush through the concrete thing, the house is going to fall apart.
It's going to be crooked. There'd be places that have dips. If you do not take the time to make the foundation of that house as straight and as secure and as strong as possible, everything falls apart. There is nothing different when it comes to undergraduate education. If you do not take the time and the resources and the materials that are being given to you by the instructors in these courses and work through it, you're not going to succeed.
You're just, you're just not. If you don't take the time at the beginning of your career. To understand the things that matter, the things that your instructors who are the ones who are in the field who are the ones doing this work that are telling you this is what you need to know at UMGC, so much of what we do is distance learning, which means that because it's an asynchronous class, you are not getting direct attention, like in the moment live attention.
You're being given the readings and you're being asked to write up something or create a video of something or a project of something. And the more that you commit to what you're being asked to do, the more that you take that time to understand what you're reading, understand why you're reading it, the better you're going to be positioned for success because everything builds off of everything else, right?
This is, there's, there's that old television trope of like, Oh God, why do I need to know geometry when I grow up? Well, you might not, but geometry, for example, might affect set design. You may not know you're going to be a self designer, but the geometry part of that is important. So, degrees are not created, the requirements for a degree aren't created because people are being hard asses or because they want you to suffer through these things.
It's because this knowledge that is being shared with you, that's been curated for you by these instructors, has been deemed essential for you to be able to function in society. Taking your time, really getting into the work that's being asked of you is the best way that you're going to succeed here.
Life is busy. Of course it is. We are all busy. And there are absolutely weeks where I'm not ashamed to admit that I tossed off an answer because I had too many other things going on. I'm embarrassed by that. But if I did that, I would then the next week make sure I went back and really made sure I understood the material before moving on.
Because everything builds on everything else. And in this environment, no one's going to hold your hand. That's
Nathan James:
Big. So commitment to that time, right? Stay disciplined, right? Lay that foundation. You said that keyword a couple of times. From, let me ask for, and we'll start to wrap up here, I think. I can ask from even a slightly different angle.
From the motivation side of things, right? Um, you. are a contagious personality, right? I mean, I, I, I, you just are. Um, and there's a fire and a passion for what you do. I'm sure your students see that when you teach. Um, for people who have their dreams, you said you dream big, right? Just talk a little bit if you can about what it means to dream big and how important it is to keep that passion.
Even as you lay that foundation in order to achieve those dreams, right? To not give up, to not let go, keep the fire burning strong.
Kevin Finkelstein:
When we're children, our minds are so unencumbered, right? The things that we think about, the ways that we approach things are so out of Out there compared to how adults do it, because at some point as an adult, we're told things, Oh, things don't work that way.
Or you should be able to do this or, you know, whatever rules that are informing your outlook on life. Right. I'm the biggest rule that I have heard that I have heard. Is to not dream too big because you'll let you'll get your hopes out, right? Things are hard. Of course, they're hard. Anything worth doing should be hard.
Otherwise, what's the point? And so when you're looking at how you approach these big ideas, why you're able to wrap your head around them, why it's so important to you, you have to ignore those voices of people who told you this is what you should be doing. You have to ignore the voices of people who say this is how it works in society.
You think about what you want. Don't think about what you want in terms of what society has, in terms of what your field is actually doing right now. Think about what is the best thing for you. Right. And at UMGC, if area of focus is a department here, then the faculty can help you narrow down how to get there because they're not going to be realistic.
They're not going to say, Oh, well, you should be doing. No, they're working in these fields. They have experience in these fields and they're going to tell you your idea is amazing. So here's how I think you can start, get started with that. So the biggest obstacle to any of these ideas is money. It's always going to be money.
It's not resources. It's not time. It's not materials. It's not people. It's always money, but your instructors are going to help you figure out where to get that money from. That's what they're there for. That's what we're there for. So as you start your careers, you start thinking about or returning or changing your career because UMGC will let you do all of those things.
As you start thinking about that, really don't constrain yourself to what you know is happening or what your friends might be doing or what you saw on television. Think about what you want to do and then you can start to make the path to make it happen. Kevin,
Nathan James:
Thank you. Thank you. And I can't tell you just how inspirational.
I know that listeners are going to hear students, even if you're not necessarily a student are going to take from your journey, right? And, and, and the insight and the words that you gave there. Thanks again, Kevin. And I want to thank our listeners, thank our viewers, uh, for, for watching, uh, for listening and sharing this time with us.
Um, if you want to see more. Unstoppable stories. Please remember to like and subscribe and we'll be here and we'll see you next time as well.
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