The networking event that I went to this spring was actually through The Griffin here at Canisius. 10 of us on our staff went to San Francisco on a newspaper trip to attend the ACP conference which is a student journalism conference. Obviously, the trip to San Francisco was a blast as we got to see many cool places and notable landmarks, but I’d say the highlight of the trip was the conference as a whole. There were a ton of other schools there, many from California but some from other places far around the country as well.

Most of the people I met were other student journalists. They were all extremely passionate about journalism and making the world a better place, so it was awesome to be surrounded by like-minded people. Most of the events were breakout sessions, and I felt like I got a lot of valuable information about newspaper layout, utilizing social media, writing better articles, and running a staff as Editor-in-Chief from these presentations. If anyone has grabbed a copy of the Griffin recently or looked at our social media, you’ll see that we’ve made some pretty awesome changes. I was a little nervous going into the conference because I’ve never attended such a large, multi-day networking event, but it ending up exceeding my expectations, and I learned so many new things as well as bonded with the Griffin staff in the process!