[ONLINE TEXT: First Steps to Opportunity: Los Angeles Valley College ]
[VISUAL: Closeup of LinkedIn Manager Steve Katcher speaking. ]
I couldn’t have gone anywhere if I didn’t start somewhere and this was the right place to start. My name is Steve Katcher. I was a Valley College student in the 90s. I transferred from Valley to Berkeley in 1997. I’ve been at LinkedIn since about 13 years ago and I run a sales organization for them now.

[ONLINE TEXT: How did you find Valley? ]
[VISUALS: Steve Katcher walking through Valley College campus, sitting in classroom, looking through campus window. ]
Valley College has been like air. It’s really been around me since I was a child. I think I rediscovered Valley College when I wanted to pivot my life and so I returned to something I knew. It wasn’t something that kind of like, you know, tapped me on the shoulder. I came back to an old friend that was there for me when I needed it.

[ONLINE TEXT: What should people know about LAVC? ]
[VISUALS: Steve Katcher flipping through campus magazine, exploring campus, aerial shot of campus.]
Oh my God what a resource it is! It’s incredibly rich here. There’s a lot for everybody. I remember feeling seen at Valley College. They understood who I was. They they took the care to get to know me and to kind of nurture me in class. When I got here I as very hungry for the experience. I was an “re-entry student” is what they called it, at Berkeley at the time. So I was an older student that came back. It was incredibly stimulating and it was great to feel like I had encouragement for just pursuing my interests. I don’t know that people really think of it for the springboard that it can be, and I think it’s a little underappreciated.

[VISUALS: Steve Katcher walking through campus and in classroom.]
I love the old architecture here; the breezeways and the mid-century modern. Your facilities have gotten way better; your new buildings are gorgeous. This one that I’m in is amazing; just the sense that it’s perpetuating, it’s reinvesting in itself it’s still meeting the community where it needs to. It is great to see. It’s not an artifact.

[ONLINE TEXT: Why consider a community college? ]
[VISUALS: Steve Katcher surveying campus and in classroom.]
I run a global sales team. I do a lot of international travel and I meet people all the time from other countries where they don’t have this ability to easily, kind of turn your life around and pivot into a different direction. And we do. And it’s an incredible powerful thing. It was for me.
[VISUAL: LAVC Logo.]