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The experience as student body president was just one aspect of being a student here.

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Had I not had that experience, had I lost that election,

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my experience would have been very much the same.

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I gained experiences through that, like I said, special experiences

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like being an ex officio member of the board of trustees.

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It added to something in my-and I learned from that experience.

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But my main learning experiences here were just as a mainstream student, through that.

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Now the interactions with Dean Hawkins were through the NC Fellows Program,

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which I also don't remember how I got into that.

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It was a great program. It was a leadership development program.

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So I never asked him, how do you pick somebody that comes from a little town that's-?

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I bet it probably had something to do with the pulp and paper scholarship.

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It might have had something to do with how I got in an applicant pool.

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But that NC Fellows Program and the ability to interact with Dean Hawkins

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probably had the biggest impact,

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I think, on me as a student and in helping me because he just had a tremendous ability-

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among others, not to take away.

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I mentioned Prof. Rogers earlier, and all these people that just listened,

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and I had to have sounded like a dope a lot of the time,

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silly questions, especially with as little as I'd been exposed to relatively at that point.

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all of that collectively added up to an experience that, again,

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has been a central part of what then followed in terms of the development of my life and career.

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So I owe a lot to the university, I owe a lot to the people I interacted with here

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who treated me decently and gave me the time of day and gave me guidance and things of that nature.

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What I didn't mention before and probably should mention is I came

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from this little town in north Florida [and my] surname, Arroyo, my father's family had immigrated first from Spain to Cuba

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and then he and my mother had immigrated to the United States,

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and he ended up in Palatka.

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He played baseball in the days before everyone watched everything on television

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and when Three-A baseball, Two-A baseball was a big deal,

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but Palatka was the last city that he played baseball in. He was offered a contract,

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a professional contract, and this is how things change. My older sister was on the way

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and the money-. He went to work for the paper company

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because the money wasn't good enough to really support a family for the future and he thought [it was a] better career,

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so that's what brought us into that circle of being in Palatka, Florida

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in the shadow of a paper mill.

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So my parents had immigrated here, they had had an education in Cuba,

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or at least [part of an] education in Cuba,

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but that did not translate to the United States.

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So I also owed them a lot-I guess I want to make sure [I mention that]-

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in terms of helping to guide me and to encourage me and to pursue, for example, the scholarship, to pursue going out of state.

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Now to really date myself, I-95 wasn't finished yet.

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When I started at NC State in 1974 there were

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large sections of I-95 between Florida and North Carolina that were not completed,

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and mostly through Georgia you had to drive on two-lane roads and stuff,

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so we would drive in the middle of the night, about a twelve-hour drive.

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Once the interstate was finished it's like a nine-hour drive or whatever.

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But that was a challenge, to go from a small town and again to go

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that distance, but I think I mentioned before, they came to Raleigh with me for orientation

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and they felt it too and they were supportive of my coming here.

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It was a great decision. I've been very fortunate to have

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fallen into some good decisions along the way, despite poor judgment maybe. [Laughs]

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But thankfully one of them involved NC State and it was a great result for me.