Chris Cate: Welcome to the Fluent in Floridian podcast, featuring the sunshine state's brightest leaders talking about the issues most important to the people of Florida and its millions of weekly visitors. In this episode, created by SalterMitchell PR, our Executive Producer Heidi Otway, the President of SalterMitchell PR, talks to Dr. Randy Avent, the founding President of Florida Polytechnic University.

Heidi Otway: Randy, thank you so much for joining us on the Fluent in Floridian podcast.

Dr. Randy Avent: Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

Heidi Otway: So Florida is home to 12 public universities with Florida Polytechnic being the newest. Since opening in 2014, you had an inaugural class of more than 550 students and the university has grown tremendously since that time. What makes Florida Poly different?

Dr. Randy Avent: Well, I think there's three things that when we look at us in comparison to the other universities in the system, there are three things that we think are different about the university and reason why students might come. First one, and the most obvious one, is we're small. We're very small, so we have a very intimate feel to the university and a very high-touch model. Our classes are largely taught by full-time faculty. Only about 10% of our classes are through adjunct, so no graduate students, so very close interaction between the students and the faculty. Other big differentiator is we're very project-based, so our students get a lot of hands-on development. We really focus very heavy on theory and fundamentals, because theory and fundamentals is what makes students lifetime-employable. Those things don't change.

But what employers are really after these days are technology. Because they want students when they show up the first day, to be able to use the technology and to create solutions to problems. Problem is that technology changes. It's not lasting, and so, matter of fact, Michael Dale just did a study that said that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 don't exist today. And so what we really try to do is balance between the theory and fundamentals so that you have that long-term resilient expertise, but we give projects that teaches the technology so that you're ready for the workforce.

Other big thing, besides being small, is that we're new, and that allows a lot of flexibility to the university. You'll never hear anyone at the university say, "Well, I'm not going to do that because that's not always the way we've done it." There is no way that we've done it, and so as we're new and we grow, there's a lot more opportunity for industry to influence the direction of the university, and we pay lot of attention to that because we know the reason the university was created was to serve industry and try to help catalyze an economic development activity in the high-tech, high-skill, high-wage area.

And then the last thing is we're 100% STEM. STEM is a very broad area. OMB, Office of Management and Budget, actually defines three types of STEM. Behavioral sciences like psychology and sociology, life sciences, microbiology, botany, zoology and then what they call Core STEM. Core STEM is engineering, mathematical, physical sciences. In the state of Florida, we graduate 2 1/2 times more behavioral scientists than Core STEM and about 2 1/2 times more life scientists than Core STEM. But the really good-paying jobs are in that Core STEM area. So that's exactly what we focus in, only engineering, mathematical and physical sciences.

Heidi Otway: Okay. So give me an example of the hands-on, project-based curriculum. Give me a good example of that.

Dr. Randy Avent: Throughout all the courses, we have our students actually try to go off and solve real-world problems. So when they learn the theory in the course, then when they go to labs, we give them projects that they have to work on. That does a couple of things: One thing is it allows them to apply what they're learning in class. But the other thing is it lets them work together in teams. That's important because when you show up for work the first day, no one tells you to go sit in your office and turn your textbook to page 138, do the odd-number problems.

Heidi Otway: Right.

Dr. Randy Avent: And they tell you that they have an issue and you need to go fix it. And they don't tell you what the issue is; you have to figure it out. But the other thing is, you have to work part of a team. As we know, engineers aren't always the most social people. So building that ability to work in team, ability to communicate is really important. Then a senior capstone project every student has to do and those are motivated by industry.

So we go work with our industry partners and we have them give real-world problems to our students. And then we have the students go off and work on those. The only thing that we ask out of our industry partners is that they participate in it to make sure that they keep the students on track and they don't get too far off track.

Heidi Otway: So I would imagine that you have industry banging on your door to come work with your kids, your students.

Well, we're a new university and so a lot of that is around branding and everything else. But we have about 300 industry partners now, a fairly good number. Of those 300, I'd say maybe half of them are fairly active. But we are working to try and figure out which ones we work the best with and which ones we can really build deep and lasting relationships with. We do a career fair every year and it has grown each year and so this past year, we had 55 companies come to our career fair.

 So we have a pretty good relationship with, I'd say, about 50 to 60, where we really are providing lots of students to them, both for internships. Because all of our students have to complete an internship to graduate. It's actually a condition of graduation. We also work with them through the student projects and then, of course, we work with them to actually hire our graduates.

Heidi Otway: So if a business or a tech industry or a startup or someone is listening to this podcast and they're interested in partnering with you, what should they do?

Dr. Randy Avent: Contact anyone at the university, certainly can contact me and I'll connect them with the right people. But we do have a careers group that does a lot of work to try to build those industry partners.

Heidi Otway: What's an ideal partner for Florida Poly?

Dr. Randy Avent: Ideal partner is someone certainly within our area that needs our expertise, but that isn't always really an engineering firm. You know, one of our programs is around analytics. Analytics goes through everything.

Heidi Otway: Yes, it does now.

Dr. Randy Avent: It can be within the finance industry. I can be within all kinds of industries. So it's someone that has problems that are in our sweet spot. We work with all companies, but I think one of our differentiations is as a small university, we can develop relationships with small and medium-sized business that may not get the attention of a larger university. Because larger universities have so many graduates that they really want to develop relationships with those companies that are big that are going to be consumers of lots of their graduates. Because we're so small, we're more than happy to work with small/medium businesses that might hire someone every other two or three years. So we do a lot of work with small/medium businesses and a lot of times, that's where a lot of the growth comes from.

Heidi Otway: What about global companies? Are you all attracting global companies, you know, international, who are looking to you all for their-

Dr. Randy Avent: Not so much those companies yet, but we certainly are attracting global students and we are growing our international population at the university.

Heidi Otway: So let's talk about that. I mean, how are they finding out about Florida Poly?

Dr. Randy Avent: So we have four Fulbright agreements, international agreements and those number of agreements are actually increasing. So we're doing a lot of work internationally. We have a faculty development program that we work internationally and do research with other universities. So we're trying to have a fairly large international presence. One of the reasons for that is engineering's a global field. So it's really important that our students get used to working with global partners.

Heidi Otway: Do you all have a diverse staff that speaks multiple languages or are the students English speakers? How do you manage that culture on your campus?

Dr. Randy Avent: We do have a very diverse faculty body that, both internationally, but diversity among other areas as well. Again, I think that's important for the students to get introduced to that and to be able to work and feel comfortable in that environment. All English-speaking, though.

Heidi Otway: So talk about the impact of STEM in Florida's economy and where Florida Poly kind of falls into that.

Dr. Randy Avent: Well, clearly, I think that a lot of the motivation for creating the university was around growing that STEM workforce. When I came here, I heard all about the three-legged stool of Florida being agriculture, tourism and retirees and that those were all low-skill, low-wage industries. So there was a desire within the state of Florida to grow a high-tech, high-skill, high-wage economy around STEM. I know when I got here 2014, so it was probably around 2015, there was a WalletHub survey that looked at the top STEM areas in urban cities. And I believe four out of the bottom five cities were in Florida.

I think that it has increased significantly. I know that they're not in the bottom anymore. So you're seeing a lot of the cities move up because there really has been an attention to this put across the whole state. But I think that you can look and find almost any statistic that you want on this, but I think that within Florida, we have data that suggests that STEM careers pay about 86% more than non-STEM careers.

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Dr. Randy Avent: And I think that's the number that we just got recently from an economic development report. And so that really is what we're trying to do is, the university is trying to create that workforce.

Heidi Otway: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So you've had one? How many graduating classes have you had?

Dr. Randy Avent: We're had our inaugural class, which started in 2014, graduated last year. Now we had a couple graduations, few graduations before that from people that got out before the four years. We also had some graduate classes that graduated. But we had our first big graduation last year and getting ready for our second one.

Heidi Otway: Congratulations.

Dr. Randy Avent: Thank you.

Heidi Otway: So what was the job-placement rate for your graduating class?

Dr. Randy Avent: We don't know for sure until 18 months afterwards. That's when all the data has come, that the board of governors gets that data. But our initial data shows pretty good. I think the number I remember is 79% or 89% now have jobs and average, I think, salaries are ranging from about 50 to 70K, something like that.

Heidi Otway: That's interesting. And at this point, you don't know yet if they stayed in Florida or if they went to other places.

Dr. Randy Avent: We don't know. We don't know. We won't know that yet for another six to eight months, I think, is when that data shows up for our first class.

Heidi Otway: Okay, so the university is located in Lakeland, Polk County, and you're between Tampa Bay and Orlando. And for anyone who's ever traveled along I-4 corridor, they would see this university growing out of the ground from the very first facility. Tell me about the first facility, which I've seen. I've toured it when it was under construction.

Dr. Randy Avent: The first and only facility is a Calatrava building, Santiago Calatrava, which is probably one of the more famous architects. Now he has buildings all around the world, the transportation hub in New York City that replaced the World Trade Centers is one of his buildings. And we were very fortunate to get him to agree to build the university. 2016, our building was named as one of the 16 most breathtaking buildings in the world, according to architects. So architects around the world voted our building as one of the 16 most breathtaking buildings.

Heidi Otway: And it's beautiful.

Dr. Randy Avent: It is a beautiful building. It really makes a statement. I think that we get a lot of our students because it makes such a bold statement about being innovative. So I jokingly say that we have one of the 16 most breathtaking buildings in the middle of a cow pasture in Polk County.

Heidi Otway: Yeah, in Polk County.

Dr. Randy Avent: But when I say that, a lot of people think that's a very negative thing. I actually think it's a very positive thing. The reason why it's such a positive thing is it gives us lots of opportunity for growth.

Heidi Otway: Right.

Dr. Randy Avent: As you know, many universities create research parks as a conduit for how they create economic development in those research parks. But what we've found through the years is that not all of those research parks are successful. One of the key features of being successful in a research park is being close to the university. The further the park gets away from the university, then the weaker the ties get between the park and the university. So by having all this land around us, it allows us to grow a research park around Florida Poly.

And not only to do that to create more economic development, but it really is probably going to be the way that we have to grow the university because there's not going to be a lot of capital money to continue to grow buildings on a university. So what we envision is that we would tear down the fences of the university and the university would go into the park. The park would come into the university and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference where the university started and where the businesses stopped.

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Dr. Randy Avent: In fact, within buildings, you would have companies and in rooms adjacent to the companies, you would actually have labs that were university labs. Because what we know is when you bring academia, industry and government all together to work on a common, hard problem, that's where you really get the most bang for your buck. Because they each own different parts of the problem. So government really owns the requirements.

It owns the customer and it has the source of funds. What academia owns is the problems that no one knows how to solve, that where you need to create new knowledge to come up with solution of those problems. And then industry owns, once you have a roadmap or a theoretical solution, how do I engineer and build it and maintain it and commercialize it and get it out on the market?

Heidi Otway: Right. It has the tech transfer piece.

Dr. Randy Avent: And that's a tech transfer between the university and the industry. So what we know is the parks that bring those three pieces together are the ones that make the most success. So that's what we're trying to create around the university is a business park where the businesses and the university are all integrated together.

Heidi Otway: Does that align with the new facility that you're going to be breaking ground on in the fall?

Dr. Randy Avent: Well, the Applied Research Center?

Heidi Otway: Yeah.

Dr. Randy Avent: Yes, we hope to break ground on that this fall and certainly, that's a key part of that. But now, we're a one-building campus. When the building was built, I'm not sure exactly what the vision was for the university, but it was built without any research space or very little office space. You know, it's a wonderful building full of classrooms, but not a lot of lab space. So the Applied Research Center really is a necessary component to provide that lab space so our faculty can do research. But really also, because we're so hands-on, our students have to spend a lot of time in the labs working.

It's like my old friends that were in dental school. You spent during the day learning all the theory about how to be a dentist and then you spent the night actually creating dentures and creating caps and everything else. So that's the environment that we're looking for and right now, we're missing that lab piece.

Heidi Otway: So I was reading recently that you have a partnership with the Florida Department of Transportation.

Dr. Randy Avent: We do.

Heidi Otway: Can you tell us about that, and the Suntrax, I think it's called.

Dr. Randy Avent: Well, that is Suntrax. So that is really the first example of us doing exactly what I was just saying, is how do you bring together government, academia and industry?

Heidi Otway: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Randy Avent: And so, as you know, the autonomous vehicle market is a huge market. It's very early in its stages and so all the cities and states are vying for a piece of that market. Again, you can come up with almost any estimate of what you think that market's going to be, but the estimates, generally, people believe are around 87 to 100 billion dollar market.

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Dr. Randy Avent: Everyone's vying for it now. It's going to be a hugely disruptive industry. It's going to disrupt just about every industry that touches, you know, emergency rooms, lawyers, auto manufacturers, everything. And so we're very fortunate here in the state of Florida that Florida's taking a very aggressive mode towards making sure that, instead of rolling out the red tape, they roll out the red carpet. And Florida Turnpike Enterprise has been very visionary in coming up with this concept for a really advanced state-of-the-art test track.

We were able to work with them and find a piece of property adjacent to the university and they've built a 400-acre research park around testing autonomous vehicles. So we're working with them on that and we're trying to put together a university team, but also start attracting companies in. We have one company we've been talking to about coming in and trying to get them to put their corporate headquarters there as well.

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Dr. Randy Avent: But we'll see. I'm sure that we will start seeing a very large industry around that test track.

Heidi Otway: So this is the first of many. What do you think could be next?

Dr. Randy Avent: I think one of the next things we really think a lot about is healthcare and how do we go in and get involved in healthcare? I know that's a crowded space. But I tell stories, so excuse me if this is too long. But I grew up in North Carolina and then I moved to Boston. When I was in Boston, there was a full-length article in the Boston Globe on North Carolina. And basically, what it was saying was that North Carolina was still, in a way, the banking industry from Boston, which was going to Charlotte. And it was still, in a way, the biotech industry, which was going to Research Triangle Park. Well, I can tell you Research Triangle Park now is pretty dead.

Heidi Otway: Really?

Dr. Randy Avent: It's pretty dead and there are a few reasons.

Heidi Otway: It seems the model.

Dr. Randy Avent: It is a model, but I'll tell you. I'll get back to that in a second. But Cambridge Biotech is really strong. One of the reasons is is a white paper that came out of MIT several years ago that talks about the convergence of life sciences and the physical sciences and the mathematical sciences. What is basically says is that life scientists, by far, spend their careers trying to figure out how things work, which really is basic science. You know, why is a frog green? How does a kidney work?

Heidi Otway: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Randy Avent: What's the purpose of Purkinje fibers in a heart? Those types of issues, right?

Heidi Otway: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Randy Avent: So they conduct experiments to pick apart a system that exists and try to figure out how it works. And their success for them is writing a paper and having that published. Engineers, on the other hand, have a different culture, which is you give me a problem and I'll come up with some way to solve that problem. And by bringing those two together and having engineers and mathematicians and computer science working on life science problems, what comes out of that is actually marketable solutions to real world problems. And nanotechnology really is what's been able to bridge that gap. So I think there is a very interesting place for Poly as a very engineering-focused mathematical-science focused organization to work on life science problems, things like synthetic biology. Synthetic biology is no different than, for instance, what the microchip industry did.

Heidi Otway: So what is synthetic biology? I think I know what it is, but tell us.

Dr. Randy Avent: It's a lot of putting functionality into genes and organisms so organisms can actually produce chemicals, they can produce drugs and those types of things. So it's a very growing industry. Certainly, a lot of work around using data and informatix and analytics to improve health outcomes, lot of focus there. If you go up to MIT to Broad Institute, which is a genomics institute, my guess is maybe 20% of the people there are geneticists. You know, the other 80% are computer scientists and mathematicians and physicists that deeply understand those particular fields that work with the geneticists. Because it's not one or the other. You really have to have both. You have to bring both of them together and really work together on those teams.

Heidi Otway: I'm Heidi Otway and you're listening to Fluent in Floridian, the podcast created by SalterMitchell Public Relations that features the best and brightest leaders in Florida. We're back with Dr. Dr. Randy Avent, the first and founding President of Florida Polytechnic University. You come from higher ed and you also come from the federal government, having worked with the U S Department of Defense, but you were also at MIT. So how are those learnings helping you come up with this vision and plan for Florida Poly?

Dr. Randy Avent: I think that they all influence. I was at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which is a research institute at MIT and I convinced my wife, we would go up there for two years, three years at the very most. And somehow or another, I ended up staying 24 years there.

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Dr. Randy Avent: But the last two years, I did what's called an IPA and I was appointed into the Defense Department as the chief scientist of basic research, basic applied research within the Defense Department. So that was a wonderful opportunity to really shape the defense budget and shape also, kind of the trajectory of defense research. And a lot of the things that we do now really come out of that and kind of what I learned in doing that particular job. So, and then-

Heidi Otway: So tell me about some of the projects you did with the Department of Defense, unless it's classified.

Dr. Randy Avent: Well, fundamentally, the basic in applied research is not supposed to be classified. That is, actually, one of the projects is what we call troublesome clauses and that's a real issue for a lot of universities because most of the funding agencies, despite the fact that there's a Presidential decision directive that says it's not classified, they still tend to classify it. So we worked on policy issues like that. One of the biggest things I did as I worked on, basically, the strategy behind the funding. And I used 80/20 split.

And 80% of the funding was really working on problems where you might have the Defense Department come in and say, "I've got a real issue. I need better autonomous systems or I need better wide-area surveillance, or I need better decision support." And then, of course, there's always a lot of problems with those. But we call those top down problems or system pull, is I've got an existing problem and I need you to go off and do some research to try to figure out how to solve that particular problem. And what we know about that particular style, requirements-driven style is it's an efficient process, but you never get anything better than what you had hoped to get.

Heidi Otway: Oh, really.

Dr. Randy Avent: So this is the way I shop for socks. I go to the store. I back into the shop to the sock aisle. I pick up a sock. I go, I pay for it and I walk out. The best thing that ever happens is I get a sock.

Heidi Otway: Right.

Dr. Randy Avent: When my wife goes to the store, she goes everywhere except the sock aisle. Sometimes she doesn't come home with a sock, but she comes with an $800 Italian suit that she got for $35. So that's that bottoms-up opportunity-driven and so I took 20% of our money and I put it in that. And that's for things like brain mapping, quantum communications, quantum physics, in particular. You know, there were five things that we think that would come out of quantum physics, and my guess is 30 years from now, none of those five are going to work out. But something that we never, ever expected will work out. But here's the thing. You're never going to hear a general come in and bang on the table and say, you know, "We need more quantum communications within the Defense Department."

Heidi Otway: Right. That's true.

Dr. Randy Avent: But if you look at the really big things that happen, there was not a requirement for lasers. Lasers was some knucklehead academic that wanted to decide whether he could hear a light. Another one had an application there was no requirement for. You know, there was no requirement for the metrology that went into GPS. We had LORAN and LORAN worked perfectly fine and people were happy with it. But someone studied how accurate could I make timing devices and that led to GPS. There was no requirement for jet engines; no requirement for aircraft carriers, no requirement for drones. And so the really big things that happen come out of no requirements, but we do know it's a very inefficient process. So we do a little bit of that at the university.

Heidi Otway: Yeah, that's what I was-

Dr. Randy Avent: We do our 80% blocking and tackling to build a university, to make it a great place, to build the curriculum, to build the student body, to build the faculty body. But we take 20% and we put it on these high-risk, high-payoff things that, if they happen, they happen really big and they transform the university.

Heidi Otway: Wow, that is just absolutely fascinating. How does one get accepted into Florida Poly?

Dr. Randy Avent: Pretty much the conventional way and you know, it certainly requires good grades. As a small institution, it's really important that we graduate students that are incredibly talented if we're going to have an impact because we don't have the numbers. I usually ask people, "Do you know how many students are at Cal Tech?" 2,000 students.

Heidi Otway: I didn't know that.

Dr. Randy Avent: MIT has 4,000 undergrads. But 26% of the entire Massachusetts economy can be traced back to MIT. So you don't have to graduate a lot of grads, but if you're going to be really impactful and make a difference within the state, you have to make sure that they're very good. So we have done very well about tracking really high-quality students.

Heidi Otway: What's your enrollment cap, per se?

Dr. Randy Avent: Well, we don't have a cap, so much. We're now about 1,400 students and we believe that we have the space to get to about 2,000 students. Our problem, again, isn't with the classrooms. It's with the research space and the office space. Right now our faculty offices are about six feet wide and maybe 10 feet deep. So yeah, they're much smaller than your average closet and they're all full of faculty. So we're going to have to go to some model where we're going to have to steal some student space to put in some kind of makeshift offices or something, so that's a big issue for us.

Heidi Otway: Yeah, I was going to ask you, what are some of the challenges at Florida Poly right now? The opportunities seem amazing, but what are some of the challenges that you're facing?

Dr. Randy Avent: I think the biggest challenge is biting off too much, trying to do too much. I don't know if you watched, I think it was a 60 Minutes episode that had Elon Musk. And they were asking him about when the new Model 3 was going to come out, that was the $35,000 model. And he said, "I don't know." And he gave it a time and I think it was Lesley Stahl said, "Well, I take it that you're going to really work to get it out at that time." And his response was, "You know, I've never built a new car company before. I don't know how long it takes." And it really struck home for me because, you know what? I've never built a university before. I don't know how long it's going to take.

What I do know is you can't build it in three years or four years or five years. It takes a little while and we're going to have to be patient about it because you don't turn it into a world class university overnight. But you know the conventional, the whole concept behind innovation dilemmas, The Innovator's Dilemma, which is a book by Clay Christensen, is that large organizations have to behave in a certain way because they can't take any risk because it takes so much to feed that organization.

Heidi Otway: Right.

Dr. Randy Avent: So when you have a small company come in that can take those risks, at first everyone looks at it and frowns upon it and says they don't know what they're doing. But eventually, over time, they find the right recipe. And so we like to think of ourselves that way.

Heidi Otway: So where do you feel you are right now in that whole right-recipe part?

Dr. Randy Avent: We're making great strides. The first five years of the university really was about existence. As you know, the university was a battle. There were a lot of people that were for it. There were a lot of people against it. As part of that process, when the governor signed a bill, there were six legislative mandates that defined the creation of the university. And so our first five years was really just a laser focus on hitting those six legislative milestones. Two of them weren't that difficult. Two of them were pretty difficult and two of them were next to impossible. So our first five years really focused on that.

Now that we've finished that five years, we transitioned our focus from one about existence to one about excellence. We're about two years, 2 1/2 years into that now and we've made great strides at that. But we've still got a little ways to go. Like I said, it takes a little bit, takes time to grow your faculty body. You don't grow that very quickly. We grew our student body much faster than our faculty body. So now we're beginning to finally catch up with the faculty body, get a very good, strong faculty group in.

We have to do more class shaping to get the students that we want in and the students that can be successful at the university. Because, as you know, retention graduation rates in engineering programs are pretty low. There's this little thing, I don't know if you've ever heard of it, called calculus.

Heidi Otway: Calculus.

Dr. Randy Avent: And a lot of students get to the second calculus and decide maybe they really don't want to be engineers.

Heidi Otway: Oh, wow. Yeah.

Dr. Randy Avent: In a place like Florida Poly, there's three semesters of calculus and then that just clears you so you can take the real math classes. So we have to make sure that we're getting the right students in that we're shaping it, because we don't do any favors to anybody if we get students in that can't succeed at Poly. Because we're 100% STEM, we don't have any what people generally refer to as retreat majors. If you can't make it in the engineering, there is nothing else for you to go off and do and that's one of our challenges.

So our big challenge, I think, is really around trying to do too much too quick, but also around just giving ourselves time to mature and get to where we want to get. I'm real pleased with where we're at, though.

Heidi Otway: I drove down I-4 and when we were doing the pre-meeting, I shared with you that I'm driving and I see the facility. And I slow down and believe it or not, FHP, don't come get me. I'm trying to take photos while driving, of the building. So that's the only building on campus but I guess-

Dr. Randy Avent: Only academic building.

Heidi Otway: ... only academic, but there are others.

Dr. Randy Avent: There are.

Heidi Otway: And so what are the next ... You talked about the research. You talked about the Suntrax. You talked about more classroom space. In the next five to 10 years, what could we potentially see?

Dr. Randy Avent: I think that we have the main IST building, which is the academic building, mostly classrooms. We have two dorms that we built through P3 relationships. We have a wellness center, which is where the cafeteria and the bookstore is. Then we have a student development center. And so the next building that we're really pushing is an applied research center.

Heidi Otway: Right. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Randy Avent: And the applied research center gets us to a point where we have about the right amount of classroom space and research space to match the dorm space. So we have a fairly well-balanced campus that would get us to about 2,000 to 2,500 students, somewhere in that area. The long-term plan for the university, and I think that that's all we can really count for in the next five years, being realistic. The long-term plan is on the other side of the building, there would be a student activity center, which would have a conference center and so we can attract big conferences, technical conferences.

It would have also a student success center, which is where all of our career, counseling, where all of our student success, academic success, mental health programs, all of that would go into that. And then the campus, if you've ever been on it, it has five ponds that go south that split the campus. The east side of the campus is the student side of the campus where the dorms and the student success center and all that would be. And then the west side of the campus is the academic side, which would have the applied research center and then four academic buildings.

The students would basically get up in the mornings and walk across the bridges over to the academic side. So that was the layout of the university. I don't know when and if we'll ever get to that point where we have that. I think that probably a more reasonable trajectory may very well end up being the research park and the university goes into the research park.

Heidi Otway: I have a very odd question to ask, just about the student body. So what do they do for fun? We have, here in Tallahassee, we have Florida State football and we have FAMU football. And a lot of our other public universities have these sports and activities. So what do your students do for fun?

Dr. Randy Avent: Well, they don't do football. One of the conditions of creating the university was that we didn't have any intercollegiate sports. And it really didn't make much sense for our university.

Heidi Otway: Yeah, I was wondering. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Randy Avent: Our students really aren't that particularly interested in that. I tell you, a lot of them do things like hackathons.

Heidi Otway: What's a hackathon for those who may not be familiar with that.

Dr. Randy Avent: A hackathon is students come together on a Friday night and Sunday afternoon, they have to have something built and they compete.

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Dr. Randy Avent: So you come together on Friday night. You don't sleep over the weekend. When we have hackathons, you walk around in our commons area, there is sleeping bags set up and food everywhere.

Heidi Otway: Oh my goodness.

Dr. Randy Avent: And you come up with a business idea and then you put a team together that goes off and builds it. So we do that. We just had, this is going to sound very nerdy, but last Saturday, we had an Integral Bee.

Heidi Otway: A what?

Dr. Randy Avent: Integral Bee.

Heidi Otway: An Integral-

Dr. Randy Avent: Integral Bee.

Heidi Otway: ... Bee.

Dr. Randy Avent: So you're familiar with spelling bee?

Heidi Otway: I know a spelling bee, right.

Dr. Randy Avent: Well, do a spelling bee, but you have to do calculus integrals.

Heidi Otway: On my goodness.

Dr. Randy Avent: So you get up, just like a spelling bee, instead of giving a word that you have to spell, you're given an integral and you have to solve it. And you compete, so that's one thing. And we're looking at expanding that into a Circuits Bee and a bunch of Coding Bee and a bunch of other contests. So we do a lot of competitions. We do have a athletic, a multipurpose field. So we do have students, they go out and play soccer in the multipurpose field. There's a lot of Frisbee golf. We have basketball courts, outdoor basketball courts. And every year, the faculty and staff play the students.

Heidi Otway: Oh, really? Who's leading in the-

Dr. Randy Avent: Well, I would-

Heidi Otway: Who's winning?

Dr. Randy Avent: I would normally speak a lot bolder than what I did because we got beat pretty badly this year, but we do have a ringer that did not play this year, so we got beat pretty bad. So it depends. If they force it to be a full-court game, we never win. If it's half-court, we have a chance.

Heidi Otway: Yeah, I think you're having more fun than the students, it seems.

Dr. Randy Avent: Oh, we are.

Heidi Otway: I mean, for those who are listening, he is smiling so brightly right now.

Dr. Randy Avent: It is a very intimate place. We have students over at the house all the time. Matter of fact, we went out yesterday after church and was eating breakfast and saw three of the students. And we invited them over and they sat with us and we bought them breakfast. So there's a lot of contact between faculty, between the administration, between the students. You know, we really do operate as kind of one big family.

Heidi Otway: That's wonderful. That's wonderful. So you've now been in Florida how many years?

Dr. Randy Avent: This end of June will be fifth year.

Heidi Otway: So tell us about your love of Florida or what's different about Florida versus where you were before, North Carolina and up north. What's the difference?

Dr. Randy Avent: I think one thing, size. Size is a big issue. But I tell you what we love about it, my wife and I both, is very, very high quality of living. I tell people somewhat jokingly, but somewhat true, is that if I stop at a stop light in Lakeland and there's more than four cars in front of me, that's considered a traffic jam. People complain about the traffic and, of course, that was not the case in Boston. So very high quality of living. You know, I think that's one of the great things about Lakeland is it's a low-cost of it's living. The people in Lakeland are just absolutely fantastic.

We've met friends that we'll be friends for life there. Some of our closest friends, I think, are from the Lakeland area. So we really enjoy being here. The other thing is that, you know, it has so much to offer in terms of different places that you can go to. When we came here, I told my wife, "Once a month, let's just travel somewhere different in Florida and spend the weekend." We haven't been doing a very good job of that, but we have been able to see a little bit of it.

Heidi Otway: Okay, well that kind of runs right into the questions that we like to wrap up our interviews with.

Dr. Randy Avent: Sure.

Heidi Otway: So the first question would be since you've been here, is there a Florida leader that you admire? It could be someone from a different industry or field or someone that's in your circle now.

Dr. Randy Avent: That's a tough one. There are so many. I'll tell you one person that I have a lot of respect for and I think really has taught me a lot, not just about business and everything else. It's actually my next-door neighbor.

Heidi Otway: Really?

Dr. Randy Avent: Yeah, my next-door neighbor is an Indian immigrant, came after college and started a company up in Michigan and moved to Florida. And the company went through some difficult times, but he stuck with it. There were times that it was very difficult. A much easier thing was to go off and work for someone else. And he turned that company around to a very successful company now and I have a tremendous amount of respect for him, that he was able to do that, that he had the grit. And one of the things that we know is grit's very important.

It's not always your SAT scores ... And a tremendous amount of grit to turn that company around. But the other thing is that outside of that company, he is the nicest, kindest person you will ever meet. He will do anything for anybody. He literally would give you the shirt off his back-

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Dr. Randy Avent: ... if you needed it. And then the other thing, he's a very community-oriented, you know, gives back to the community. Tremendously gets involved in the community and so I think my neighbor, [Puche Patel 00:40:54] would be the guy, right off the bat, come up with.

Heidi Otway: That's wonderful.

Dr. Randy Avent: Yes.

Heidi Otway: What person, place or thing in Florida needs more attention or deserves more attention than what it's getting right now?

Dr. Randy Avent: Well, I believe that Florida would benefit by more attention on K through 12. I think K12 education is critical to growth of any state and I think that if you looked at the states that had the highest GDP and you looked at their school systems, you would find that the school systems are very, very good. And so in the world of analytics, we would say there's certainly correlation. I don't know if there's causation, but I bet there's causation there. I think that we really need to get the K through 12 system and really produce wonderfully-educated students.

Heidi Otway: You mentioned earlier that you and your wife tried to travel around Florida. But since you've been here, what's one of your favorite places to visit in Florida?

Dr. Randy Avent: Well, without my wife, one of my favorite places is Ocala National Forest. As it turns out, I race hare scrambles.

Heidi Otway: What's that?

Dr. Randy Avent: Hare scrambles is dirt bikes and it's a little bit like motocross, but through the woods.

Heidi Otway: Oh, nice.

Dr. Randy Avent: So I race hare scrambles and there is a group of us that go riding, so we spend a lot of time at Ocala National Forest-

Heidi Otway: Very nice.

Dr. Randy Avent: ... when I'm riding. So that's one of the areas but outside of that, one of the areas that I think that we've been most impressed with was we were traveling around Jacksonville and we decided that we really wanted some seafood. So we did a little search for a good seafood place. And there was a seafood place in Fernandina Beach. And we went to Fernandina Beach and we fell in love with Fernandina Beach.

Heidi Otway: Beautiful location.

Dr. Randy Avent: Beautiful area and just such a nice little downtown area, and also very quaint. You felt at home there and so we fell in love with that.

Heidi Otway:  Okay.

Dr. Randy Avent: So we have visited a couple of times since then.

Heidi Otway: I love Fernandina Beach. So you race, what are they called again?

Dr. Randy Avent: Hare scrambles.

Heidi Otway: Hare scrambles, so that means you have a little bit of competitive nature to you. So last question, what's your favorite Florida sports team? Do you have one?

Dr. Randy Avent: This is where I could get in trouble since I was in New England for 24 years.

Heidi Otway: Yes.

Dr. Randy Avent: I don't actually follow sports too much. I tend to follow more college sports-

Heidi Otway: Okay. That's fine.

Dr. Randy Avent: ... than I do professional sports. Well, it would have to either be the Bucks or the Magic-

Heidi Otway: Okay, good.

Dr. Randy Avent: I think on the professional side. But yeah, I apologize. I don't follow it too much.

Heidi Otway: Okay, good.

Dr. Randy Avent: Yeah.

Heidi Otway: Well, before we wrap up, I mean, this has been an amazing interview and I've learned so much, but I think that we're going to have some listeners, they know a little bit about Florida Poly, but not a whole lot. So if there was one thing that you could leave them with about Florida Poly and why they need to pay attention, what would that be?

Dr. Randy Avent: I think just the reason for why it was created is to graduate students that are very strong technically, also have the social skills and professional development skills that can go off and really be the fuel that drives the economy in Florida and creates this high-tech industry.

Heidi Otway: All right, well thank you so much, Randy. [crosstalk 00:44:47] It was a pleasure having you.

Dr. Randy Avent: It was a pleasure being here. Thank you so much.

Heidi Otway: Thanks.

Chris Cate: Thanks for listening to the Fluent in Floridian podcast. This show is executive produced by April Salter, with additional support provided by Heidi Otway and the team at SalterMitchell PR. If you need help telling your Florida story, SalterMitchell PR has you covered by offering issues management, crisis communication, social media advocacy and media relations assistance. You can learn more about SalterMitchell PR at saltermitchellpr.com. You can also learn more about the Fluent in Floridian podcast and listen to every episode of the show at fluentinfloridian.com or by searching for the show using your favorite podcast app. Have a great day.