In just a couple hours, I will be hopping on a plane bound for Las Vegas with my supervisor so we can go do something we have worked hard on for the past eight months.

In March, Lindsi Glass, our associate vice president for marketing and branding, asked if I wanted to work on a proposal with her to present at a conference. But it wasn’t just any conference. She wanted to submit to the American Marketing Association in hopes that we would receive an invitation to present at the 2019 AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education.

Lindsi and I will be presenting at the AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education on Monday, Nov. 11.

Long shot? Perhaps. But we had a great presentation topic and we drafted an intriguing proposal. A couple months after we submitted, we received word that our proposal had been accepted! We took a day or two to celebrate the achievement and then we started the process of mapping out our presentation. Little by little it started to come together. Lindsi and I are both Type A personalities so we set deadlines and objectives to make sure our prep was productive and that we would be in a position to succeed come tomorrow.

Ah yes, tomorrow. In front of higher education marketing executives and staffers from all across the country, we will take the stage at Caesars Palace to represent Coastal Carolina University the best way we can. We will present “Stop Posting. Start Collaborating. Gen Z and Digital.” Using research and examples from our #CCU social media strategy, we will explain how we optimized our Instagram account (@ccuchanticleers) for Generation Z. We will provide six tactics we used to formulate our strategy and the research that inspired each one.

Monday afternoon will be a career highlight for me. This will be my first time presenting at a national conference and to have it come at one of this stature makes it even sweeter. But this milestone isn’t just about professional growth, it is about personal growth too. I probably took too many trips to Las Vegas in my early and mid-20s simply to have fun. Six years after my last visit to the city, I will return to Vegas not as a young, immature know-it-all but as a higher education professional.

I can’t thank Lindsi enough for allowing me to work with her on this. We make a good team and it has been a pleasure watching everything come together. Cross your fingers that it all pays off tomorrow! Don’t Blink.