>> I'm in the government for 20 years.
The last 10 years I've been doing this, but before then I worked in the Office
of the U.S. Trade Representative and I worked in the trade area.
And so the constant throughout my career has been trade.
I worked on making contributions to trade agreements and earlier than that I was
at the Department of Labor where I worked on a number of domestic
and international labor issues that, again, you know, fostered that interest
in trade jobs, trade, so on and so forth.
Excelsior came into the picture because, obviously, I was working
and I had had many credits before with a number of different schools,
but I had also had a number of credits with the former Excelsior Regions College
and I really wanted to just really finalize all that.
I wanted to have a bona fide degree, an accredited degree, and I wanted to move
on to have the opportunity for graduate work.
And so it was really long overdue and it didn't take very long because I had all those credits
and all that previous preparation.