Many of us are on an island teaching inorganic chemistry at our home institutions so it is tremendously useful and invigorating to interact with the IONIC/VIPEr community of like-minded chemistry educators. I have taught inorganic chemistry for ~10 years and tweaked the course slightly each time but now I have hard data that I can use to guide the changes I make to my course next year. The benefits of being a VIPEr Fellow greatly outweigh the small amount of work it took throughout the year.