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Hi.

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So I'm Carlin Ring.

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I'm also a Senior at Mt.

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Holyoke.

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And unlike a lot of my
fellow LEAP presenters,

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I didn't do an internship or a
research project this summer.

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I actually worked on a
creative project through LYNK.

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I worked on a verse novel.

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And for anybody who
might be wondering

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what a verse novel is?

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It's a novel length narrative
told in poetry, or verse,

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instead of prose.

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The first one that kind of
most people are familiar with

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is actually Beowolf.

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But it continues to have a
pretty long tradition today.

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So what was my first
novel in particular?

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So this novel was Saga's Skin.

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It's a young adult coming of age
story with selkies, mermaids,

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and a train ride.

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It's set in a small town in
Iowa and in San Francisco,

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and the moments in between.

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Starring the main characters of
Adelaide, who is 15, confused.

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She loves swimming, painting,
and Saga, who is also 15,

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is a selkie, and is
completely confused

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about what her place
is in the world.

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It follows them
through the last couple

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months of their freshman
year of high school,

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and into their summer break.

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And then something terrible
happens during Saga's--

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during their last
couple of weeks.

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So they decide that they need
to take a trip to San Francisco

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to find Saga's mother who
she's never met before.

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In order to do this, there were
a few logistics to figure out.

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For one thing, the LYNK
funding doesn't actually

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advertise a creative
project as something

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that you can do for it.

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They hide it.

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They bury it a little
bit in the material.

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[LAUGHTER]

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For good reason.

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Because they have
had experiences.

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But it was so exciting to me
when I was looking through

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and saw, if you're doing
a creative project,

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fill out these things.

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And I said, OK.

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What's this?

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Tell me more.

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I need to do figure it out.

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So I figured out that I
needed to have an advisor,

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I needed to have a plan, and
I needed to have a home base.

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The advisor was
just as difficult

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as finding out that I
can do a creative project

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in the first place, because
most of the people at Mt.

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Holyoke who deal in poetry
and creative writing

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are doing it themselves,
or have projects

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that they're doing
over the summer.

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So I ended up finding Professor
Sally Sutherland, who,

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while not directly
involved in poetry,

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was directly involved
with me and my Mt.

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Holyoke journey.

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And she ended up being
the perfect person.

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I also developed a plan.

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Google Drive,
Scrivener, which is

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a program that would let
me see all of the poems

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and not just have to
scroll a million miles--

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[LAUGHTER]

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--ended up being the
tools of the trade.

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And I settled on
17 poems a week.

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Somewhat arbitrary.

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But I figured 200 poems over
the course of the summer,

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how hard can that be?

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I can write 17 a week.

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And that will be great.

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It was a step up
from the one poem

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a week that I had been
doing in Verse 1 and 2--

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[LAUGHTER]

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--at Mt.

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Holyoke.

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But I figured if I'm going to
fail, I'm going to fail hard.

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[LAUGHTER]

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And I went to my home
base of Lincoln, Nebraska

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where my family
had recently moved.

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So I didn't grow up there.

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But it is close enough.

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But in order to do this, when
I got on the ground in Lincoln,

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I needed to do some research.

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First thing first was selkies.

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Selkies for those of you who
don't know, are seal people.

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They live as seals that are
able to shed their skin and come

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live as humans.

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And oftentimes
get trapped there.

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A lot of people who
steal them away.

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It's all very tragic.

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It's all very Irish, which
is where most of the folklore

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comes.

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Ireland, Scotland,
and the Faroe Islands.

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But this is research that
I've been doing for years.

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My primary interest
lies in folklore.

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And so this was something I
was like OK, I've got this.

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Same thing with being
a teen-aged girl.

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I was one at one
point, and I recently

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acquired a stepsister
who is currently one.

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[LAUGHTER]

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So I knew that I would have
not too much difficulty there.

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My main issue laid
in San Francisco.

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I'm from Iowa.

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I've only stepped
in the ocean twice.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Once in the Atlantic,
once in the Pacific.

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San Francisco was
not a place that I

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was at all familiar with.

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So I turned first to the thing
I knew best, which was podcasts.

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Podcasts being people
talking about things

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was the best way that I knew
for me to auditorily process

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the information.

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I found there was one podcast in
particular, 99% Invisible, that

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did a podcast about how
San Francisco was built,

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being kind of sand and
rocks thrown onto the ocean.

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And it gave me a
great sense of what

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it might be like
for somebody just

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to be dropped in the middle
of this strange landscape.

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I looked at newspapers.

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I even found one letter
to the editor of somebody

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who was so angry at their
views being blocked.

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But in their anger, gave
me a great description

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of what those views were.

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And I was also lucky
enough to have a friend who

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grew up in San Francisco.

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And even though we were 600
miles apart over our summer,

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she was gracious
enough to send me

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an auditory tour of from the
train station to the pier.

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And that informed a lot
of what I was working on.

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And it worked pretty well.

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When I was writing I had
these immediate experiences.

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And even though
they were secondary,

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I would revise and get better
wording, better choice,

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better order of things to figure
out how to portray something

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that I had no familiarity with.

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But I began to run
into some trouble.

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While the poems set in San
Francisco were pretty solid,

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small town Iowa
wasn't doing as hot.

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Now part of this might have
been the order that I wrote it.

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I started off with
Iowa since that's

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where the girls started off in.

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And as I wrote 17
poems a week, which

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I did manage to keep up with--

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[LAUGHTER]

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--it's a lot.

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And it flexes those muscles.

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And so those muscles weren't
as strong when I began in Iowa.

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And by the time I
got to San Francisco,

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they were worked
out a fair amount.

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But I also think it was
about how much attention I

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was paying to the research.

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I had been looking
at Iowa and Nebraska

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as a place that I already
knew, and not as a place

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that I needed to look at.

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I chose Nebraska because
of its convenience,

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but I needed to start looking
at it because of its setting.

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I started to look around.

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I went downtown and sat
in coffee shops to write,

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and hopped from one place
to another to people

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watch and take in my atmosphere.

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I took trips back to
my hometown in Iowa,

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where Adelaide and
Saga's hometown

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was based pretty heavily
on, and sat and looked

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at the cornfields not as a
memory, but as an experience.

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And in that, I was able
to go back to the poems

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that I had already
written and figure out

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how to make them better.

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How to better-- how to take--

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pardon me.

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Because memories are something
that, as you remember them,

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they degrade.

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And I had to make new ones.

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This experience worked
because I had a plan.

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One of the other big
challenges that I ran into

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was somewhere
around week three, I

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realized that I wouldn't have
200 poems worth of material.

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I was on track to
do it time wise,

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but I wasn't on track to
do it within the story.

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But I realized that
and shrunk that down.

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I spent a month
and a half writing,

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and a month and a half revising.

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And even though my
plan was adjusted,

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I kept it updated to be
something that gave me

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a better product in the end.

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I had a fully revised
manuscript instead of

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a brand new fresh one.

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And I had support.

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I had Lynk funding, I
had a place to live,

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and I had an advisor
who I knew was

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on the other end of
the computer screen.

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That was crucial.

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Most importantly, I had a
story that I wanted to tell.

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I had something that I was able
to take from idea to almost

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completed product.

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And that was something
that I wouldn't

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have been able to do without
the resources that Mt.

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Holyoke gave me.

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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