San Francisco Weekend Pt. 1

As the Arts and Culture Editor for The Daily Aztec, San Diego State's campus newspaper, I got to go to a journalism conference in San Francisco from Feb. 26 to March 1. We sent a group of more than 15 staff members on this fun adventure.

The city is beautiful with the tall glistening buildings and the rollercoaster roads. I did not explore the city as much as usual because I was really involved at the conference.

We left San Diego early in the morning, landed, changed into business casual in the airport bathroom and took Bart to go straight to the convention. The convention was held in the downtown Hyatt Regency right outside of the Embarcadero Bart stop.

Changing from airport slums into conference business casual is a little trickier than I planned, but I made it all in one piece.

The conference was broken up into sessions with different speakers and topics. The first one I went to was Launching your creative career with Kevin Fullerton. He helped open my eyes to new portfolio ideas and other creative tactics to strengthen my resume.

The next impactful session I attended was the Great secrets of visual storytelling by Sara Quinn. She was super inspirational, and she really spoke to my passion for photojournalism. I connected with her and another student afterwards to get coffee later that day.

I took a lot of notes from her session, so here are some of the ones that stuck out to me.

• What inspires me and what do I see?
• Visual storytelling is magic.
• You are introducing subjects in a personal way.

After Thursday sessions ended, two editors and I went to another editor's house to stay for the weekend because we only had enough money for flights. 

Our hosts were super nice and had a really welcoming house. They fed us and helped us settle in. The family was so great, staying with them was awesome. 

Day two of the Bart and conference opened with my first session called Rising above the noise: Establishing your niche in the Internet Age hosted by Scott Strazzante. He is another photojournalist who inspired me with tips such as:

• Trust you vision.
• Be ready for your luck.
• Serendipity is one of the best things your photos can have.

He also spoke from his experience with shooting for the San Francisco Chronicle and his own personal social media accounts. He has two books out right now as well. His advice really gave me an idea of where I should take my photography journey. I am excited to start breaking out my camera soon.

Then I went to Brand me: Mastering social media to brand yourself with Michele Boyet. Her session was all about how to use social media to help solidify and promote your own personal brand which is super helpful for me because of this blog. I really want to start creating a better personal brand for my endeavors because I want professionals to get a sense of what I love. 

My last session was So you want to be a foreign correspondent with Rachele Kanigel and Amara Aguilar. Both of these women spoke about journalism abroad and different programs they are involved in to help develop other journalists' skills abroad. 

They gave me great resources on where I can find jobs abroad to get experience or organizations that could help fund the projects I want to do. I hope I can stay in contact with them, so they can help me navigate a career abroad if that is my next step.

The night wrapped up with some neighborhood karaoke with some of our staff members.