Best Zeta Alpha Podcasts (2025)

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Chad Coltrane, Epsilon Iota (University of North Carolina – Greensboro) 1:09:12

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11M ago1:09:12

1:09:12

On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” host Zorth and Gary interview 2-time Pi Alpha, Chad Coltrane from Epsilon Iota (University of North Carolina – Greensboro). Chad completed Journey of Hope (JOH) South Route as a cyclist in 1991 and as Project Manager in 1992. Chad was the CEO of The Ability Experience (formerly known as PUSH…

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Nolan Carpenter, Kappa Omega (University of Utah) 42:24

11M ago42:24

42:24

On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” host, Zorth, interviews Pi Alpha, Nolan Carpenter, Kappa Omega (University of Utah). Nolan completed Journey of Hope (JOH) North Route as a cyclist in 2023 . Nolan is currently a Senior and has served his chapter as Philanthropy Chair, Archon, and Warden. Nolan is the first Pi Alpha and Lead…

1
Richard Pierce, Alpha (College of Charleston) 43:04

11M ago43:04

43:04

On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” host Zorth interviews Pi Alpha, Richard Pierce, Alpha (College of Charleston). Richard completed Gear Up Florida (GUF) as a cyclist in 2023. He is currently the Chapter Advisor for the Alpha chapter and serves on the standing committee of the Ritual and Insignia Committee of Pi Kappa Phi. In…

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Chase DuMond, Alpha Iota (Auburn University) 41:27

12M ago41:27

41:27

On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” host, Zorth, interviews 2-time Pi Alpha and the 2024 "Thomas Sayre Philanthropist of the Year Award" recipient, Chase DuMond, Alpha Iota (Auburn University). Chase completed Gear Up Florida (GUF) as cyclist in 2022 and Journey of Hope (JOH) TransAmerica Route as a cyclists in 2024. Chase joi…

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AGI vs ASI: The future of AI-supported decision making with Louis Rosenberg 54:42

12M ago54:42

54:42

In this episode of Neural Search Talks, we have invited Louis Rosenberg, CEO of Unanimous.AI, to discuss the future of AI in decision-making, contrasting the development of artificial superintelligence (ASI) with collective human intelligence systems, such as swarm intelligence. In particular, Louis argues that the advancement of AI should focus on…

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Ethan Norman, Delta Lambda (University of North Carolina - Charlotte) 51:15

12M ago51:15

51:15

On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” host Zorth and Gary interview 2-time Pi Alpha, Ethan Norman Delta Lambda (University of North Carolina - Charlotte). Ethan completed Journey of Hope (JOH) North Route as a cyclist in 2018 and Gear Up Florida (GUF) as a cyclist in 2024. Ethan joined the Fraternity staff after 3+ years working…

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Evan Austin, Eta Beta (Indiana State University) 1:05:58

12M ago1:05:58

1:05:58

On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” host Zorth and Gary interview Pi Alpha, Evan Austin, Eta Beta (Indiana State University). Evan completed Gear Up Florida (GUF) as a cyclist in 2023. Evan is a keynote speaker for ForCollegeForLife, and a team member of Team USA. He is a 4-time Paralympian in swimming (London 2012, Rio 2016, …

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EXAONE 3.0: An Expert AI for Everyone (with Hyeongu Yun) 24:57

1y ago24:57

24:57

In this episode of Neural Search Talks, we welcome Hyeongu Yun from LG AI Research to discuss the newest addition to the EXAONE Universe: EXAONE 3.0. The model demonstrates strong capabilities in both English and Korean, excelling not only in real-world instruction-following scenarios but also achieving impressive results in math and coding benchma…

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Zeta-Alpha-E5-Mistral: Finetuning LLMs for Retrieval (with Arthur Câmara) 19:35

1y ago19:35

19:35

In the 30th episode of Neural Search Talks, we have our very own Arthur Câmara, Senior Research Engineer at Zeta Alpha, presenting a 20-minute guide on how we fine-tune Large Language Models for effective text retrieval. Arthur discusses the common issues with embedding models in a general-purpose RAG pipeline, how to tackle the lack of retrieval-o…

1
Michael Harvey, Kappa Eta (SUNY Geneseo) 32:27

1y ago32:27

32:27

On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” host Zorth interviews two-time Pi Alpha, Michael Harvey, Kappa Eta (SUNY Geneseo). Michael completed Build America (BAM) as a foreman in 2019 and project managed in 2020. In this episode, you'll learn how Michael incorporates the values he learned as a Pi Alpha into his career as a high scho…

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ColPali: Document Retrieval with Vision-Language Models only (with Manuel Faysse) 34:48

1y ago34:48

34:48

In this episode of Neural Search Talks, we're chatting with Manuel Faysse, a 2nd year PhD student from CentraleSupélec & Illuin Technology, who is the first author of the paper "ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models". ColPali is making waves in the IR community as a simple but effective new take on embedding documents us…

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Drake Lloyd, Eta Psi (University of Central Florida) 39:48

1y ago39:48

39:48

On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” hosts Zorth and Gary interview three-time Pi Alpha, Drake Lloyd, Eta Psi (University of Central Florida). Drake completed Gear Up Florida as a cyclist in 2021, project managed in 2024 and Journey of Hope as a cyclist in 2023 on the North Route. In this episode, you'll learn how Drake stays c…

1
Using LLMs in Information Retrieval (w/ Ronak Pradeep) 22:15

1+ y ago22:15

22:15

In this episode of Neural Search Talks, we're chatting with Ronak Pradeep, a PhD student from the University of Waterloo, about his experience using LLMs in Information Retrieval, both as a backbone of ranking systems and for their end-to-end evaluation. Ronak analyzes the impact of the advancements in language models on the way we think about IR s…

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Designing Reliable AI Systems with DSPy (w/ Omar Khattab) 59:57

1+ y ago59:57

59:57

In this episode of Neural Search Talks, we're chatting with Omar Khattab, the author behind popular IR & LLM frameworks like ColBERT and DSPy. Omar describes the current state of using AI models in production systems, highlighting how thinking at the right level of abstraction with the right tools for optimization can deliver reliable solutions tha…

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The Power of Noise (w/ Florin Cuconasu) 11:45

1+ y ago11:45

11:45

In this episode of Neural Search Talks, we're chatting with Florin Cuconasu, the first author of the paper "The Power of Noise", presented at SIGIR 2024. We discuss the current state of the field of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and how LLMs interact with retrievers to power modern Generative AI applications, with Florin delivering practica…

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Benchmarking IR Models (w/ Nandan Thakur) 21:55

1+ y ago21:55

21:55

In this episode of Neural Search Talks, we're chatting with Nandan Thakur about the state of model evaluations in Information Retrieval. Nandan is the first author of the paper that introduced the BEIR benchmark, and since its publication in 2021, we've seen models try to hill-climb on the leaderboard, but also fail to outperform the BM25 baseline …

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Andre Arman, Zeta Epsilon (George Mason University) 58:03

1+ y ago58:03

58:03

On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” hosts Zorth and Gary interview 7-time Pi Alpha and 3-time Bruce Rodgers Award winner, Andre Arman (Zeta Epsilon, George Mason University), who completed his first Pi Alpha event at the age of 35. Within a 10 year span, Andre completed 7 summer events including Journey of Hope in 2002, Gear U…

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Patrick Carlson, Iota Kappa (Greeley) 42:45

1+ y ago42:45

42:45

On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” hosts Zorth and Gary interview four-time Pi Alpha and current Ability Experience staff member, Patrick Carlson, Iota Kappa (Greeley). Carlson completed Journey of Hope in 2017 and 2018 as crew member and project manager and then Gear Up Florida in 2019 and 2022 as project manager and cyclist…

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Baking the Future of Information Retrieval Models 27:05

1+ y ago27:05

27:05

In this episode of Neural Search Talks, we're chatting with Aamir Shakir from Mixed Bread AI, who shares his insights on starting a company that aims to make search smarter with AI. He details their approach to overcoming challenges in embedding models, touching on the significance of data diversity, novel loss functions, and the future of multilin…

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Hacking JIT Assembly to Build Exascale AI Infrastructure 38:04

1+ y ago38:04

38:04

Ash shares his journey from software development to pioneering in the AI infrastructure space with Unum. He discusses Unum's focus on unleashing the full potential of modern computers for AI, search, and database applications through efficient data processing and infrastructure. Highlighting Unum's technical achievements, including SIMD instruction…

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The Promise of Language Models for Search: Generative Information Retrieval 1:07:31

1+ y ago1:07:31

1:07:31

In this episode of Neural Search Talks, Andrew Yates (Assistant Prof at the University of Amsterdam) Sergi Castella (Analyst at Zeta Alpha), and Gabriel Bénédict (PhD student at the University of Amsterdam) discuss the prospect of using GPT-like models as a replacement for conventional search engines.Generative Information Retrieval (Gen IR) SIGIR …

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Ruben Talavera, Eta Omega (New Mexico State University) 54:34

1+ y ago54:34

54:34

On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” hosts Zorth and Gary interview 7-time Pi Alpha and Nu Phi Society member, Ruben Talavera, Eta Omega (New Mexico State University), who completed Journey of Hope in 2006 as a crew member and then cycled Gear Up Florida in 2007, 2009, 2019, 2020 and 2022. Since his retirement of summer events …

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Austin Gothard, Iota Nu (Mississippi State University) 31:41

2y ago31:41

31:41

On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” hosts Zorth and Gary interview Pi Alpha Austin Gothard (Iota Nu, Mississippi State University), who completed Gear Up Florida as a cyclist in 2022, led the TransAmerica team as Project Manager in 2023 and will be cycling Gear Up Florida a second time in 2024. Austin will also be a Leadership…

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Jeremy Jones, Alpha Gamma (University of Oklahoma) 46:39

2y ago46:39

46:39

Welcome to episode 14! On the newest episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” hosts Zorth and Gary interview Pi Alpha and Team AbEx Ambassador, Jeremy Jones (Alpha Gamma, University of Oklahoma), who completed Journey of Hope as a cyclist in 1998, 2001 and as project manager in 2009. Jeremy has walked across Spain, biked around New Zealand, was …

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Michael Davis, Psi (Cornell University) 31:34

2y ago31:34

31:34

Welcome to episode 13! On this episode of “The Shared Experience Podcast,” hosts Zorth and Gary interview 1997 Journey of Hope North Route cyclist, managing director at Merrill Lynch and current AbEx board member, Michael Davis. Learn how Michael’s Journey of Hope experience led to him hosting the Inaugural Empire State Ride in New York, and saying…

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Rob Raesemann, Zeta Zeta (University of North Florida) 46:37

2y ago46:37

46:37

Welcome to episode 12, featuring Rob Raesemann from the Zeta Zeta chapter of Pi Kappa Phi. In this episode, hosts Zorth and Gary talk with Rob about being a 6x Pi Alpha, his involvement for the AbEx Challenge: Gate River Run and the future of the Zeta Zeta Chapter. A snippet about Rob: "Rob's initiation into Pi Kappa Phi over 35 years ago set him o…

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Smart Salary Negotiations 27:05

2+ y ago27:05

27:05

Welcome to season 2, episode 3 of Money Mommas The Podcast, presented by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated., Xi Zeta Omega Chapter. In this episode, we will be discussing winning strategies for negotiating the salary you deserve. Keep up with the Money Mommas on Social Media! ⁠https://linktr.ee/moneymomma1908…

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Budgeting Basics 24:05

2+ y ago24:05

24:05

Welcome to season 2 episode 2 of Money Mommas The Podcast, presented by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated., Xi Zeta Omega Chapter. In this episode, we will be discussing tips for creating a realistic budget that will set you up for successful money management. Tune in next week on Tuesday, April 18th to learn about how to negotiate your salar…

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Saving with Success 16:13

2+ y ago16:13

16:13

Welcome to season 2, episode 1 of Money Mommas The Podcast, presented by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated., Xi Zeta Omega Chapter. In this episode, we will be discussing intergenerationally between Gen X, Y & Z to talk about savings challenges, techniques, and triumphs. Tune in next week on Tuesday, April 11th to learn about budgeting techni…

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Task-aware Retrieval with Instructions 1:11:13

3y ago1:11:13

1:11:13

Andrew Yates (Assistant Prof at University of Amsterdam) and Sergi Castella (Analyst at Zeta Alpha) discuss the paper "Task-aware Retrieval with Instructions" by Akari Asai et al. This paper proposes to augment a conglomerate of existing retrieval and NLP datasets with natural language instructions (BERRI, Bank of Explicit RetRieval Instructions) a…

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Generating Training Data with Large Language Models w/ Special Guest Marzieh Fadaee 1:16:14

3y ago1:16:14

1:16:14

Marzieh Fadaee — NLP Research Lead at Zeta Alpha — joins Andrew Yates and Sergi Castella to chat about her work in using large Language Models like GPT-3 to generate domain-specific training data for retrieval models with little-to-no human input. The two papers discussed are "InPars: Data Augmentation for Information Retrieval using Large Language…

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ColBERT + ColBERTv2: late interaction at a reasonable inference cost 57:30

3+ y ago57:30

57:30

Andrew Yates (Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam) and Sergi Castella (Analyst at Zeta Alpha) discus the two influential papers introducing ColBERT (from 2020) and ColBERT v2 (from 2022), which mainly propose a fast late interaction operation to achieve a performance close to full cross-encoders but at a more manageable computational…

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Jim Karlovec, Delta Sigma (Bowling Green) 48:52

3+ y ago48:52

48:52

Welcome back! It's been a while. On this return episode, Zorth and Gary talk with Jim Karlovec, cofounder of the Journey of Hope. This is the first episode of a longer series discussing how "A" journey of hope became THE Journey of Hope.

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Evaluating Extrapolation Performance of Dense Retrieval: How does DR compare to cross encoders when it comes to generalization? 58:30

3+ y ago58:30

58:30

How much of the training and test sets in TREC or MS Marco overlap? Can we evaluate on different splits of the data to isolate the extrapolation performance? In this episode of Neural Information Retrieval Talks, Andrew Yates and Sergi Castella i Sapé discuss the paper "Evaluating Extrapolation Performance of Dense Retrieval" byJingtao Zhan, Xiaohu…

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Open Pre-Trained Transformer Language Models (OPT): What does it take to train GPT-3? 47:12

3+ y ago47:12

47:12

Andrew Yates (Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam) and Sergi Castella i Sapé discuss the recent "Open Pre-trained Transformer (OPT) Language Models" from Meta AI (formerly Facebook). In this replication work, Meta developed and trained a 175 Billion parameter Transformer very similar to GPT-3 from OpenAI, documenting the process in d…

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Few-Shot Conversational Dense Retrieval (ConvDR) w/ special guest Antonios Krasakis 1:23:11

3+ y ago1:23:11

1:23:11

We discuss Conversational Search with our usual cohosts Andrew Yates and Sergi Castella i Sapé; along with a special guest Antonios Minas Krasakis, PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. We center our discussion around the ConvDR paper: "Few-Shot Conversational Dense Retrieval" by Shi Yu et al. which was the first work to perform Conversatio…

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Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index: memorizing thousands of random doc ids works!? 1:01:40

3+ y ago1:01:40

1:01:40

Andrew Yates and Sergi Castella discuss the paper titled "Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index" by Yi Tay et al at Google. This work proposes a new approach to document retrieval in which document ids are memorized by a transformer during training (or "indexing") and for retrieval, a query is fed to the model, which then generates au…

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Learning to Retrieve Passages without Supervision: finally unsupervised Neural IR? 59:10

4y ago59:10

59:10

In this third episode of the Neural Information Retrieval Talks podcast, Andrew Yates and Sergi Castella discuss the paper "Learning to Retrieve Passages without Supervision" by Ori Ram et al. Despite the massive advances in Neural Information Retrieval in the past few years, statistical models still overperform neural models when no annotations ar…

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The Curse of Dense Low-Dimensional Information Retrieval for Large Index Sizes 54:13

4y ago54:13

54:13

We discuss the Information Retrieval publication "The Curse of Dense Low-Dimensional Information Retrieval for Large Index Sizes" by Nils Reimers and Iryna Gurevych, which explores how Dense Passage Retrieval performance degrades as the index size varies and how it compares to traditional sparse or keyword-based methods. Timestamps: 00:00 Co-host i…

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Shallow Pooling for Sparse Labels: the shortcomings of MS MARCO 1:07:17

4y ago1:07:17

1:07:17

In this first episode of Neural Information Retrieval Talks, Andrew Yates and Sergi Castellla discuss the paper "Shallow Pooling for Sparse Labels" by Negar Arabzadeh, Alexandra Vtyurina, Xinyi Yan and Charles L. A. Clarke from the University of Waterloo, Canada. This paper puts the spotlight on the popular IR benchmark MS MARCO and investigates wh…

1
Corey Dillon, Zeta Phi (Colorado State) 37:32

4+ y ago37:32

37:32

As a Pi Alpha, Cycling Coach and Board Member, it's fair to say that Corey Dillon has impacted the The Ability Experience's cycling events more than just about anyone. Over the years, Corey has dedicated himself to the evolution of our events - particularly in the interest of safety. Join us and we uncover what Corey has added to the Journey of Hop…

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Best Practices For Maintaining Good Credit 16:03

4+ y ago16:03

16:03

Welcome to the fourth episode of Money Mommas The Podcast, presented by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated., Xi Zeta Omega Chapter. In this episode, we will explore personality types and how they relate to credit spending habits, and we will give tips on how to maintain a healthy credit score. Make sure to register for the FREE Money Mommas Cr…

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Disputing Items on Your Credit Report & Strategies for Improving Your Credit Score 23:26

4+ y ago23:26

23:26

Welcome to the third episode of Money Mommas The Podcast, presented by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated., Xi Zeta Omega Chapter. In this episode, we will be discussing disputing items on your credit report & strategies for improving your credit score! This week 3M is joined by a panel of listeners to help give you some amazing credit advice.…

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The 3 Major Credit Bureaus: How to Access & Interpret Your Personal Credit Report 27:18

4+ y ago27:18

27:18

Welcome to the second episode of Money Mommas The Podcast, presented by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated., Xi Zeta Omega Chapter. In this episode, we will be discussing the 3 major credit bureaus, and how to access & interpret your personal credit report. Additionally, we will be answering questions from our listeners! Tune in next week on T…

1
What is Good Credit and Why is it Important? 22:55

4+ y ago22:55

22:55

Welcome to the first episode of Money Mommas The Podcast, presented by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated., Xi Zeta Omega Chapter. In this episode, we will be discussing what a credit score is, how credit scores affect your access to credit, and identifying the three major credit bureaus and the types of information they compile on you. Additi…

1
Paul Drake, Zeta Lambda (Cal-State Chico) 1:15:22

4+ y ago1:15:22

1:15:22

Paul Drake has done it all. As a seven time Pi Alpha, Paul has cycled all three routes of Journey of Hope and Gear Up Florida. Join us as Paul compares and contrasts his experiences depicting the evolution of our programs over the years. Paul's involvement: Journey of Hope (1989, 1991, 1998, 2003, 2005), Gear Up Florida (2004), Pi Alpha Ride Along …

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Welcome to Money Mommas The Podcast 0:47

4+ y ago0:47

0:47

Welcome to Money Mommas The Podcast! The purpose of Money Mommas The Podcast is to provide the Black community with access to free information on money management, business, and finance, with the goal of economic empowerment. Tune in to Money Mommas The Podcast starting May 4th, 2021 on all streaming platforms. Keep up with the Money Mommas on Soci…

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Josh and Will Ingram (Theta Alpha and Iota Phi) 40:32

4+ y ago40:32

40:32

Twin brothers, Josh and Will Ingram have a lot to unpack when it comes to Ability Experience involvement. Join us as we compare and contrast two unique experiences including the 2019 Journey of Hope.

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Brent Freeman, Theta Sigma (Long Beach) 46:00

5y ago46:00

46:00

As a result of a traumatic motorcycle accident, Brent Freeman is a Pi Alpha who is now blind. While injuries have effected his memory, Journey of Hope will never be forgotten. Join us as he shares how his perspective of his 2010 experience has evolved and what he cherishes most about that summer. (Recorded LIVE as a part of 2021 Pi Kapp College for…

1
Mike McBride, Omega (Purdue) 34:10

5y ago34:10

34:10

3x Pi Alpha and past-staff member, Mike McBride, Omega (Purdue), is an adventurer. From leading The Ability Experience's only event in Europe, to most recently riding the Blue Ridge Parkway in just five days, Mike reflects on what it truly means to be a Pi Alpha and how your first event shouldn't be the end.…