-: For me, my first semester here,
I took a western civilization class
which is just a basic class.
I remember was Paula Patman and she said,
"Just to let you know, this isn't high school.
"You don't wanna show up, don't show up, you're paying for.
"But if you miss the work, you're not gonna pass the class.
"But nobody's gonna send you to the principal's office."
So you learn really, really quick,
okay, you're on your own at college.
It's changes.
My professors that truly impacted my life here,
when I changed my major three times,
when I finally discovered Human Resource Management.
There was a couple professors that stuck out in my mind.
One of them is Dr. Eugene Buccini,
who I've quoted often.
I took his Employee Productivity class,
and I'm not gonna say that was an exciting class
'cause it was anything but.
When you're a young kid,
I'm not thinking I'll own my business someday.
One of the things he said in the class,
he related real life experiences
with what he taught in the class.
Which was very helpful to kinda relate
to what he was talking about.
Just the changes, he talked about always
change with the generations.
Just remember a generation that
might have grown up in the 60's, 70's
is not gonna be the generation of 20 years later.
So you have to learn to adapt to
the generations that are coming into play.
And in my Employee Productivity class,
the strongest thing he said was,
if you treat your employees like people and not a number,
you'll get that much more back in productivity.
And that truly was the platform for NY-Conn,
and my brother and I really position that as our platform
because our industry is a service industry.