Through synthesizing all the content and lessons I have learned from my academic and professional work, as well as keeping in consideration what I will be bringing to the field, I have come to understand my passion areas within higher education. These passions are the center pieces of my continued professional development. First, I am interested in working with students to connect their academic and lived experiences. I plan to continue my work with Residential Life after I graduate from this program. As such, one way that I can continue to professionally develop along this interest is by becoming involved in living-learning programs. Through more involvement in these types of programs I will be able to develop relationships with faculty as well as work with them to create powerful experiences where students will be able to connect their classroom experiences with their residential experiences. Additionally, I will also work to collaborate with Offices of Experiential Learning. Through partnering with these types of offices, I will be able to continually develop my ability to organize high-impact learning experiences for the students I work with. The second passion area that I want to focus on is research. Short of actually conducting research while I am a full-time professional, I will be able to continually develop along this interest by staying up-to-date on current research in the field. By being a critical consumer of this research, I will be able to continually refine the skills I learned in Research Methods and think creatively of how I can incorporate that research into my work.