Recently, I was interviewed to be featured as an alum of my high school. I was genuinely excited about it, mostly because the person doing the interview was Matt Coss, a friend from high school and college whom I hadn’t talked to in years.

Matt asked me about my career path and my academic journey. I talked about being a professor, teaching courses in the age of AI (blah), helping to build the Gerontology major, and our Dementia Simulation House and outreach/education program.

As I was answering, something surprised me.

Out of everything we discussed in the one hour interview, it was the students who work with me at the Dementia Simulation House that I was most excited to talk about.

Of course, I love the community education and outreach we do. I care about educating families, professionals, and the general public about dementia.

But I also know I won’t always be doing this work. At some point, I will retire (and no…it won’t be soon). There will be a time when I’m no longer the one standing in front of groups talking about dementia.

And I think that’s why the students matter so much to me.

The students who work at the Dementia Simulation House are a part of this work that will outlast me. And it’s reassuring that there are young people who are passionate about our mission.

They may not become professors of gerontology like me—and that’s fine. They will become speech-language pathologists, mental health counselors, nurses, physical therapists, audiologists, and other professionals who work closely with people and families. They will go to graduate school. They will move into careers. And they will take the house with them, if you will, wherever they go.

They learn from me, but mostly they learn from each other.

Each year, an older cohort takes the newer students under their wing. They train them. They model how to talk with families and how to respond when someone asks a hard question.

Every year, we welcome a few new students to the team, and every year I am reminded how thoughtful, capable, and genuinely good they are.

They are smart. They care. And they have ideas—really good ones.

They’ve taken my original concept and built on it. They’ve made it better. They see things I don’t. They suggest changes. They bring creativity and energy.

I push them out of their comfort zones.–or so I am told. I make them give presentations before they feel ready. I ask them to have conversations they’re not sure they can handle. And they realize they are capable of more than they thought.

We don’t have the funding for a large professional staff at the Dementia Simulation House. We rely mostly on undergraduate students, with a few graduate students mixed in.

If you donate to the Dementia Simulation House and our programs, your donation might/can be used to support our students with compensation for internships and hours.

Our students have to learn quickly how to work with the community, how to be flexible, and how to improvise when things don’t go as planned (and that happens A LOT).

Yes, they learn about dementia. But more importantly, they learn tools to educate and support people. And they know that even with these tools, they will sometimes fail–just like I do. That’s part of it.

Knowing that when I eventually step back, there will be people out in the world doing this work in different fields and in different ways makes me happy.

There are days I don’t know if what I do matters. There are a lot of those days lately.

And our students are what motivate me to keep going.