The experience as student body president was just one aspect of being a student here.
Had I not had that experience, had I lost that election,
my experience would have been very much the same.
I gained experiences through that, like I said, special experiences
like being an ex officio member of the board of trustees.
It added to something in my-and I learned from that experience.
But my main learning experiences here were just as a mainstream student, through that.
Now the interactions with Dean Hawkins were through the NC Fellows Program,
which I also don't remember how I got into that.
It was a great program. It was a leadership development program.
So I never asked him, how do you pick somebody that comes from a little town that's-?
I bet it probably had something to do with the pulp and paper scholarship.
It might have had something to do with how I got in an applicant pool.
But that NC Fellows Program and the ability to interact with Dean Hawkins
probably had the biggest impact,
I think, on me as a student and in helping me because he just had a tremendous ability-
among others, not to take away.
I mentioned Prof. Rogers earlier, and all these people that just listened,
and I had to have sounded like a dope a lot of the time,
silly questions, especially with as little as I'd been exposed to relatively at that point.
all of that collectively added up to an experience that, again,
has been a central part of what then followed in terms of the development of my life and career.
So I owe a lot to the university, I owe a lot to the people I interacted with here
who treated me decently and gave me the time of day and gave me guidance and things of that nature.
What I didn't mention before and probably should mention is I came
from this little town in north Florida [and my] surname, Arroyo, my father's family had immigrated first from Spain to Cuba
and then he and my mother had immigrated to the United States,
and he ended up in Palatka.
He played baseball in the days before everyone watched everything on television
and when Three-A baseball, Two-A baseball was a big deal,
but Palatka was the last city that he played baseball in. He was offered a contract,
a professional contract, and this is how things change. My older sister was on the way
and the money-. He went to work for the paper company
because the money wasn't good enough to really support a family for the future and he thought [it was a] better career,
so that's what brought us into that circle of being in Palatka, Florida
in the shadow of a paper mill.
So my parents had immigrated here, they had had an education in Cuba,
or at least [part of an] education in Cuba,
but that did not translate to the United States.
So I also owed them a lot-I guess I want to make sure [I mention that]-
in terms of helping to guide me and to encourage me and to pursue, for example, the scholarship, to pursue going out of state.
Now to really date myself, I-95 wasn't finished yet.
When I started at NC State in 1974 there were
large sections of I-95 between Florida and North Carolina that were not completed,
and mostly through Georgia you had to drive on two-lane roads and stuff,
so we would drive in the middle of the night, about a twelve-hour drive.
Once the interstate was finished it's like a nine-hour drive or whatever.
But that was a challenge, to go from a small town and again to go
that distance, but I think I mentioned before, they came to Raleigh with me for orientation
and they felt it too and they were supportive of my coming here.
It was a great decision. I've been very fortunate to have
fallen into some good decisions along the way, despite poor judgment maybe. [Laughs]
But thankfully one of them involved NC State and it was a great result for me.