Admission & Financial Aid Matt Vitelli '23

Image

Hello readers!

My name is Matt Vitelli (He/Him/His) and I am a rising junior here at Amherst College. I am from West Hartford, Connecticut, only an hour drive south of campus, so home is never too far away whenever I’m at college. I am a prospective double major in History and Geology, having announced History as my first major this past spring and hoping to add Geology this upcoming fall. Beyond these two main areas of study, the open curriculum at Amherst has allowed me to take classes across a wide range of departments and topics, including (but not limited to) Russian Literature, Chinese Language, Political Science, LJST, Environmental Studies, International Relations, Greek Drama, and even Paleontology! Outside the classroom, I, like most other Amherst students, am actively involved in many other aspects of campus life. A sampling of my activities are listed below:

On-campus jobs:

• Summer Science Undergraduate Research Fellowship: My first summer here, I worked in the geology lab of Professor Anna Martini working on hydrologic analysis of well water in the Powder River Basin area of Wyoming. This was done through the SURF program, an opportunity offered by the school for rising sophomores and juniors to work directly with a STEM professor over the summer, helping them with their research.
• Lab Assistant in the Geology Department: My second summer here, I worked in the geology lab of Professor Dave Jones, studying sulfur isotope records in carbonate rocks from Anticosti Island, Canada. Being a lab assistant offers the opportunity to potentially be published with a professor, as one of the student workers that helped them during their research.
• Tour Guide: Now on my third summer at Amherst College, my job this year is working in the Office of Admissions. This job involves giving tours to summer visitors, manning the front desk of the office, working on projects related to admissions and prospective student programming, as well as putting out blog posts like these ones!

On-campus activities:

• Mr. Gad’s House of Improv: Throughout the year, I am a member of Amherst’s one-and-only, select Improv troupe! A group of around twelve students, we perform for the campus every Monday night of the year in Keefe Campus Center. Along with weekly improv shows, we also put on special events such as our annual “Murder Mystery.” The shows are a great way to relax and destress for an hour at the beginning of a busy week, and are just as fun to perform in as to watch.
• Ghostlight: I am president of Ghostlight at Amherst, a newly created theater RSO (Registered Student Organization) that specializes in putting on student-written as well as small, intensive, black-box style plays. Our first official show is already being put together this summer, a triple feature that is composed of three different Amherst students’ plays, directed by them and acted and crewed by other Amherst students! It’s super fun to be part of student-led theater here on Amherst College campus, but if you’d prefer to work with a professor, the department shows are always an option as well.
• The Amherst Student: My friends and I occasionally submit writing to our weekly student-run newspaper, “The Amherst Student,” as contributing writers. If you want to be involved more consistently, The Student also offers tons of opportunities to join their team as a staff writer contributing biweekly, an opinion columnist writing each week, or even being a section editor.
• WAMH: WAMH is Amherst’s student run radio station, hosted in Keefe Campus Center, and offering students the opportunity to host their own radio show, either playing music, hosting a podcast-style talk segment, or doing really anything you want that complies with radio guidelines. While not running my own show (yet), I love hanging out with my friends for an hour or two during their WAMH shows, helping with running the music or contributing as a guest host. I’m aiming to start my own show with my roommate at the start of next semester!

I love talking about Amherst College to anyone who would like to hear, so if you have questions about anything I mentioned above, or something totally unrelated, feel free to shoot me an email at mvitelli23@amherst.edu anytime! I’d love to respond to any questions you have, and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible. I hope you enjoy my blog posts over the course of this summer, or whenever you are reading this page!

Image

Hello readers, and welcome back to my blog! Today I will be discussing the ins and outs of the first major I declared here at Amherst: History!

A General Department Overview

The history department is the seventh most popular major here at Amherst College, with thirty-three graduates majoring in history last year. This popularity of the history major leads to the department being large and well-supported in terms of resources, faculty, and opportunities for research. The history department teaches courses across all geographic areas and time periods. Just this upcoming fall 2022 semester, there are courses being offered covering the First World War, the history of Asian Americans, the Haitian Revolution, modern Iranian history, the civilizations of the Indian Ocean, Medieval Europe, and even the history of human interaction with plants since the agricultural revolution. With dozens of courses to choose from every semester taught by many different faculty members, there are always opportunities for students interested in history to take a course, ranging from intro level courses for non-majors, to 400-level research seminars that result in substantial papers featuring original student research.

My Favorite Classes

While it is hard to narrow it down to just a couple courses from the many amazing ones that I have taken, my favorite history courses are probably “History of Modern China: from the Opium Wars to the Olympics,” taught by Professor Qiao, and “History of Fascism,” taught by Visiting Professor Merritt. The first course was my introduction to the history major at Amherst, and it was amazing. It was a 100-level survey course, meaning that it was a general investigation of a topic or time period that was geared to allow non-majors to participate, and it covered a topic I am immensely interested in: Chinese history. I learned a ton in that course about the process of modern Chinese state development, and the many challenges that Chinese society faced over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. It also exposed me to some amazing Chinese literature in translation that I never knew existed before taking the course! The “History of Fascism” course, on the other hand, was a higher-level history course that focused much more on discussion and the investigation of primary source documents. I really loved this course because it allowed me to dive deeply into a very specific historical phenomenon, the development of Fascism, specifically in interwar Europe, through the medium of writings of the proponents and adversaries of Fascism writing at the time, as well as secondary historical analysis of Fascist movements. This course resulted in me writing several papers of which I am extremely proud, particularly my final research paper that investigated the possible Fascist categorization of Imperial Japan during the interwar and WWII periods.

Major Requirements

If you decide to become a history major, there are a few things that you need to get done in order to complete the major. One of the best aspects about majoring in history is the openness of the curriculum even within the major. The history major requires the completion of nine courses, but only one of those is a hard course requirement. All history majors at Amherst must take History 301: Writing the Past, a course that focuses on teaching students how to write like a historian. This skill is essential to any further research or thesis work in the department, which is why it is the only required course in the major. The other eight courses can be pretty much any other courses within the department. Majors have a few requirements of these courses, in that they must complete one pre-1800 and one post-1800 course for time period breadth, and courses covering at least three geographic areas for spatial breadth, but these requirements are very easy to fulfill. The last requirement for majors is to have a concentration: these can be thematic or geographic. Concentrations are composed of four courses that focus on one topic or area of historical research within which the major specializes. For the geographic ones, students can concentrate in Asia, the Middle East, the United States, Africa, Europe, or Latin America. For thematic concentrations, these can be Cultures, Ideas, and Emotions, Empires, Nations, and Encounters, History of Race and Racism, or Social Justice, Rights, and Inequality. Students can also make their own concentration out of any four related courses in the department if these options are unsatisfactory. Majors have one final requirement, which is the completion of a 25-page research paper in one of the history department’s upper-level seminar courses. These requirements may seem daunting, but do not worry: multiple can be completed in the same course! For example, a research seminar on Reconstruction-era America could complete the post-1800 distributional requirement, one of three geographic area requirements, the research paper requirement, and a concentration requirement. History majors also have the option of completing a thesis their senior year to graduate with honors, on any topic of their choice.

Conclusions

This blog post was just a brief introduction to all that the history department at Amherst has to offer. For more information, I highly advise checking out the department webpage or reaching out to me via email. As always, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions you have about Amherst!

Thanks for reading my summer blog posts!
Matt Vitelli

Hello readers, and welcome back to my blog! This week I will be discussing opportunities for STEM research over the summer here at Amherst College!

Amherst Research Overview
Amherst College is one of THE best colleges to go to if you are interested in doing research as an undergraduate, and that is for two main reasons:

Image

1. Amherst is an undergraduate only institution. That means that you are never competing as an undergraduate with graduate or post-doc students for research positions at the college. The only resource the professors at Amherst have in regards to research assistants are the undergraduate students themselves. This throws the doors wide open for Amherst students to be involved with research up to the very highest levels at the college.

2. Nearly every professor across every department at Amherst is engaged in research in some form. This means that there are a ton of research opportunities open to you, both over the summer and doing the school year, if you choose to take advantage of them.

SURF Overview
The main avenue for student research in the STEM fields over the summer is the SURF program. SURF, which stands for the Summer Science Undergraduate Research Fellowship, is a program that connects students with little or no experience in lab research with professors across the STEM fields to work with them on high-level research over the summer. Research positions are open in literally every STEM field taught at Amherst, including Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Studies, Geology, Math, Statistics, Neuroscience, Physics, and Psychology. Within these programs, too, there are tons of positions. Just this very summer, Biology had eight different professors running separate SURF labs, and Chemistry had seven! Within these professors’ labs, there are numerous positions for students. As you can see, there are tons of opportunities, and if you want to take advantage of them, you can. Because the SURF program is geared towards those with very little or no lab research experience, you don’t have to worry about not being qualified. If you don’t know how STEM research works, but would like to find out, or even if you don’t know if you’ll like it, you are exactly who this program is designed for! SURF gives students a taste of professional-level STEM research, and allows them to grow a base of knowledge for future research opportunities on or off campus, and find out if STEM research is something they want to pursue.

My SURF Experience: Geology
My personal experience with SURF occurred in the Geology department. I took the course “Introduction to Geology” my first year at Amherst, and fell in love with the major. I decided to apply for a SURF position because of this, without having any research experience before this point. I was accepted, and worked with Professor Anna Martini in hydrology research. Unfortunately, that was the summer COVID first impacted us, so I had to do the program from home. I believe my second year as a lab assistant for Professor Dave Jones studying sulfur isotopes was a much more emblematic example of the program, as I had the opportunity to work in the lab on campus.

In Professor Jones’s lab, three other students and I all worked very closely with the professor on four separate projects related to geologic topics. My project was about the reliability of sulfur isotope ratios in certain carbonate rocks, and if they are/are not viable proxies for the paleoclimate. While the other three students in class were working on separate projects, we all helped each other out when necessary and shared lab spaces. The program was incredible- this was my first time in a real lab, and it was amazing to see how science really got done. The professor was also super supportive. The professors in the SURF programs want to make sure the students understand what they are doing in their research, and how their work fits into the bigger picture, and Professor Jones was amazing at this. We had meetings with him whenever we had questions, and could ask anything we wanted in order to better understand the topic we were researching. We also had the opportunity to read scientific articles related to our research and talk about them with the whole group, further helping us all grasp the purpose of our work as well as the existing literature surrounding the topic.

Image

By far the coolest part for me however was actually working in the lab. The labs at Amherst have amazing machinery, and it was super rewarding to work with these high-end scientific machines. I had the opportunity to use centrifuges to isolate my samples, elemental analyzers, which are huge machines that take samples of rock and tell you what elements are contained within, rock crushers and rock saws to prepare my rock samples, and even isotopic mass spectrometers to distinguish between different isotopes in my final samples! The research resources really are amazing at Amherst, and students are allowed to work with them very closely and independently while doing research.

SURF Culmination: 3-Minute Talks and Poster Presentation
The culmination of all SURF programs are the 3-minute talk events, where student researchers present their finished summer research to the entire student body through the form of a video, or a poster presentation in the science center during fall semester. These events allow the high-level STEM research the students were conducting to be presented to the entire school! I did a 3-Minute talk both years, and they were really rewarding, as they allowed me to synthesize all I had done over the summer and practice communicating my research to other people who may be completely unfamiliar with what I was researching. Being able to communicate about science effectively, and to have a nice conclusion to my summer research in the form of a presentation, were two very fulfilling aspects of this final program.

Where SURF Can Go
At the beginning of this summer, I ran into Professor Jones while practicing for my tours. He informed me that the paper I had been helping him on in the lab was slated to hopefully get published later this summer. This means that I, as an undergraduate Amherst student going into my Junior year, have the opportunity to be a lab assistant on an actually published scientific paper, written by an eminent professor on a subject that he has been studying for over a decade. The best part about this is that it is not an uncommon experience: plenty of students have had the exact same thing happen to them, whether through school-year research or the SURF program, and if you come to Amherst, this is absolutely a path you can pursue if you so choose!

Well, that concludes my blog for this week. See you next week for my next blog post!

Matt Vitelli

Image

Introduction to Geology at Amherst
Hello again readers, and welcome back to my blog! Today's topic of discussion will be one of my two majors: Geology! In this short blog post, I will explain all the amazing attributes of the geology department here at Amherst and hopefully convince you to try it out if you decide to attend Amherst College. Who knows, maybe one day you'll even become a major like me!

 

Image

Major History
The geology major is one of the forty-one different majors offered at Amherst College, and is (in my opinion) one of the very best. The geology major has a long history at Amherst, starting in 1825, only four years after the college's founding. Under our third president, Edward Hitchcock, the famous geologist who studied dinosaur footprints along the Connecticut River Valley, the geology department thrived. The department collected an immense amount of specimens throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of which can still be viewed in our Beneski Museum of Natural History on campus or used for student and faculty                                                                 research. This storied history has brought the department to where it is today.

Image

Major Experience: Course Offerings Overview
So what is the major really like for students at Amherst? In short, the geology major is a perfect fit for students interested in any aspect of earth science. The major spans many more topics than you might think at first glance, and of course, a geology major has to cover rocks. Whether they are igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic, you can learn about them. We have professors specializing in volcanic rocks and volcanism if that interests you. Are you more interested in topsoil and sediment formation? The class "sedimentology" might be for you! If the theory of plate tectonics is what you're really obsessed with, "structural geology" covers this topic inside and out. Those obsessed with gems and minerals or those with a chemistry inclination might enjoy our "mineralogy" course. "Paleontology" is a course offered for anyone interested in fossils. Are you super interested in how the environment and physical earth interact? The department offers courses on "oceanography," "climate change," and "surface earth dynamics" to anyone hoping to use their geology studies to protect the planet from the effects of climate change. The geology department truly covers so much ground, and all students are certain to find something they're interested in being taught by one of our amazing professors.

Major Experience: A Class Experience
Maybe all these courses sound super interesting to you, but you want to know more about what the day-to-day for someone taking a geology course at Amherst looks like. The best example to show what you would most likely experience as a geology student is the first course you'd likely take in the major, "Introduction to Geology." By explaining my experience with this intro class, I hope to shed light on what it means to be a geology student at Amherst, and a student at Amherst in general.

Image

Intro to Geology is the introductory course to the topic of geology. As such, it covers a wide range of topics over the semester. In this course, you'll learn some fundamental aspects of geology that will help you in all future courses. You'll learn to identify various kinds of sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks, being able to tell them apart just by examining them by the end of the semester. You'll also get a tray with nearly forty of the most common minerals, and you'll learn how to identify these minerals in rocks as well. Beyond learning to identify the building blocks of the natural world around you, Intro to Geology teaches you how volcanism works, the intricacies of plate tectonics, the mechanisms of magnetism, how to construct and interpret geologic maps, and how the natural landforms around you came into being, among many other topics. It truly was one of the courses I learned the most since I got to Amherst.

Outside of textbook and lecture learning, labs often involve trips. Geology is easily the major that takes the most field trips out of any, so if exploring the landscape of the Pioneer Valley (and even beyond) interests you, this is the major for you! In Intro, we visited Mount Tom! There, we studied the basalt formations and identified different types of magmatic cooling evidenced by the rocks we saw. Afterwards, we used this information and the sketches we made to construct a geologic history spanning millions of years that explains the geologic conditions we see today. This is just one field trip of many you could take. I remember during the winter of my first year, the whole department organized a trip to Hawaii to study volcanoes and lava flows on the big island.

Finally, the final project for Intro is super fun. I will not spoil the details, as it is a well-kept department secret, but just know that they have given the same final project for over half a century at this point. The final project is often described by us majors as the best part of the class, even compared to the mineral trays, labs, or field trips. The geology major truly is a wonderful major to be involved with, and even if you don't want to major, I highly encourage signing up for Intro. Who knows, maybe you'll fall in love with geology as I did during the class and decide to join the rest of us in the geo-community!

Well, that covers it for geology today. As always, feel free to email me with any questions about geology at Amherst, or Amherst in general! I'd be more than happy to answer.

See you next week,

Matt Vitelli

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog! The topic of my post for this week is one of the clubs that I am intimately involved with on campus: Mr. Gad’s House of Improv!

Intro to Gad’s:

Image

Mr. Gad’s is by far the extracurricular that I am most passionate about at Amherst. Gad’s is the best (and only) improv group on campus! We are a group of 8-14 Amherst College students that perform hour-long improv shows for the entire campus to watch every Monday night during the school year. Gad’s focuses on performing both short-form and long-form comedic improv, with scenes ranging in length from five to twenty-five minutes and including everything in between. These shows are pretty popular on campus- typically, around 100-150 students show up to watch us perform, though the exact number can dip higher or lower depending on the week. Our most well-attended shows are our special events, which have reached up to nearly 300 students at their peak! Gad’s practices three times a week, and we also just hang out as a friend group outside of practice all the time.

As a prospective student, how might you interact with Gad’s? Well, there are really two main avenues, and I have experienced them both: participating in the shows as an audience member or participating in the shows as a performer!

Participating as an audience member:

Participating in Gad’s as an audience member is most likely where your interaction with the group will begin. All of us, whether members of Gad’s or not, started out by coming every Monday night at 10 P.M. to the Friedmann room in Keefe Campus Center to watch the weekly Gad’s shows. Watching the shows is very fun, in my completely unbiased opinion. At the start of a new academic week, which can often be stressful, taking an hour at night after finishing my homework (and sometimes even before) to laugh at a comedic improv show with my friends is an incredible way to de-stress and just have fun. As an audience member, I can also choose my participation level. If I’m tired, I can just watch and laugh along with the jokes. If I’m feeling bolder, however, I can holler out one-word suggestions, which the group asks for before they start any scene, or, if I’m really lucky, sometimes the Gad’s will ask for audience volunteers for their scenes. Participation in this regard can range from telling funny stories of your own to active involvement with the scenes on stage. My entire first year at college, this is how I interacted with the group, and it was a great time!

Participating as a member:

If being in the audience is unable to sate your improv appetite alone, don’t fret- you can always audition to join the performers on stage! Each semester, Gad’s holds open auditions for all members of the Amherst College undergraduate community, allowing everyone a chance to join the group! If you get in, after a semester of training, you’ll be able to join us on stage every Monday! Performing at improv shows is a great time- it is my favorite part of every week. Beyond our weekly shows, the special events are super fun to perform in as well. Our senior shows for those graduating, as well as our newbie shows, put on to welcome our new members, are always super popular with the campus community and contain some special games and traditions that you’ll have to watch to discover. We also do mash-up shows with acapella groups on campus, where we attempt to sing, and they try out improv with us.

The best special event, however, is probably our annual “Gad’s Murder Mystery,” which happens every Fall Semester. We all choose characters, make introduction videos, and host a two-hour-long show where we interact with each other and the audience in character. In the middle of the show, a murder occurs. It then comes down to our audience to interrogate us before casting votes for who they think did it. When the truth is revealed at the end of the show, those who guess correctly are awarded fabulous prizes. It is a great event to be a part of and is usually our best-attended show of the semester.

Not only is the improv an amazingly fun time, the community that surrounds it is extraordinary. My closest friends are the other members of Gad’s, and we hang out all the time. Whether that means going to parties together, watching movies on weekends, or even organizing Spring Break trips, Gad’s is a tremendously close-knit and supportive community of which I am so grateful to be a part.

Well, that’s the end of my blog this week! I hope you enjoyed my discussion about improv here at Amherst, and if you are interested in Gad’s in any way, feel free to email me. I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions!

See you next week,
Matt Vitelli

Hello everyone! For my first blog post I will be writing about our main library on campus, Frost. Named after Robert Frost, the famous poet who taught at Amherst in the early twentieth century, Frost Library is the hub for all things schoolwork related, from studying to homework to research. Frost is a very large space that is well-loved by the student body, and if you come to Amherst you will definitely be making use of it. Given its central location and critical role in academic life on campus, I thought it would be a great idea to do a comprehensive deep-dive into the space in order to help prospective students get to know it better. Without further ado, here is my quick blog tour of Frost Library!

Frost and the 5CC
The first thing you need to know about Frost Library is that it is much larger than it seems at first glance. Of course, that is not to call it small- the six-story building is very expansive, and it is easy to get lost among the rows and rows of bookshelves when you first visit. Additionally, it certainly is not small in the number of resources it houses, either- home to hundreds of thousands of books, there is plenty of research material for use as well as nearly any generalized reading material you could want available. But this expansive collection only scratches the surface- since Amherst is part of the five college consortium with UMass, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith, Amherst students also have access to the millions of books, manuscripts, and other reference materials located at these institutions. To access these resources, you do not have to even leave Amherst campus- after a request is put in for a book online from one of the other libraries, it will take a maximum of 48 hours for that book to be available for pickup at the Frost Library front desk.

First Floor- Lobby and Cafe
When you first enter Frost, you walk into the ground level lobby. Here will be your first experience with the overall layout of Frost. As you get further away from the ground floor, either heading up or down, the noise level progressively decreases. Standing on the first floor, the noise level is that of an everyday indoor conversation, with students being able to freely talk as they sit at any one of the desks, couches, or chairs laid out among the reference bookshelves to work on individual or group projects. This floor hosts the main circulation desk, staffed by school librarians and student workers, ready to help you find any books or other resources for which you may be looking. Additionally, Frost Cafe, one of our dining options on campus, is situated on this floor. Offering small meals, snacks, and drinks, Frost Cafe is a great alternative to walking back to the dining hall if you want to stay in the library and continue working.

Second Floor- Group Work
As you head upstairs from the lobby, you will reach the second floor, a space designed specifically with cooperative group work in mind. Some professors may assign work that they encourage you to work on with your classmates, or maybe you and your classmates want to study together for an upcoming test. The large desks, tables, and individual rooms of the second floor facilitate such group work, and many students come to this level to work on projects or study guides together, helping each other learn and prepare for class.

Third Floor- Silent Work
Upstairs from the second floor, the top floor of Frost is a silent work floor. Noise is supposed to be kept to a minimum, and the desk spaces are designed for individual students to work without distraction. It is probably the most typical library floor of any in Frost, with desks spaced between high bookshelves and small, glass-paned rooms available for those who need a dedicated space within which to focus.

A Level - Archives and Computer Lab
Heading down from the lobby, A level is the first basement in Frost. A quiet work level, noise is supposed to be reduced here. A level primarily serves as a hub for Amherst’s archives collection, the main campus computer lab, and spaces for group film screenings or meetings. The archives house hundreds of thousands of artifacts pertaining to the college’s history, local history, and the history of various other fields. Included is the world’s largest collection of Indigenous literature, with over 80,000 books of this type being cataloged. The archives are open year-round for outside research, as well as research from students and faculty who wish to analyze the primary source documents housed in the archive’s collections. The computer lab hosts several kinds of desktop computers, including Dells and Macs, as well as several printers for color printing and printing in black and white.

B Level - Silent Work and Map Room
Below A level is the second basement of Frost, B level. Just like the third floor, B level is a silent floor, with noise kept to an absolute minimum. This is the level I have personally most often used, as the below-ground setup, silent environment, tall bookshelves, and desks with personal outlets and large cubicle-style dividers built in really help me focus when writing papers for my midterms and finals. B level also hosts my favorite room in the library, the map room, a designated study room for either individuals or groups that can be closed for privacy. There are several whiteboards within to write on, and the college’s map collection is housed here, with globes, splayed-out floor maps, rolled-up wall maps, and massive almanacs covering literally every surface of this room. This vibe (in my experience) is great for reading for class or working through a study guide before a test.

C Level - The Catacombs
Lastly, if you walk down beyond B level, you would reach the notorious C level, Frost’s third basement. Affectionately referred to as “The Catacombs” by the student body, if you thought any of the other floors were quiet, you’re in for a surprise. An absolutely silent floor, this realm that has not seen the light of day in decades is completely devoid of sound. You could hear pages turn on this floor from across the building, and if you so much as sneezed the students down here would look at you funny. I could never study or work down here, but my friends who need absolute focus to work on their assignments swear by it. The old rugs on the floor, dated reclining chairs, and collapsible bookshelves that reach all the way to the ceiling really add to the feeling that you’ve entered another dimension upon visiting this floor.

Conclusion
Having gone through each floor of Frost, I have given a fairly comprehensive overview of what our main campus library has to offer. Nearly anything school related you may want to do, Frost has a space for it and is more than happy to help facilitate your work. Each year here I’ve used the building more and more, and it’s always fun to walk around and see what your other friends are working on while visiting. If you come to Amherst, you can’t avoid interacting with Frost Library, and there’s really no good reason why it should not be utilized frequently.

Thanks for reading my first blog post, and stay tuned for my next one, coming out soon!