San Francisco was an experience that was like no other, and I got to learn a tremendous amount about journalism. It was my first time going to the west coast as I headed over to the ACP/CMBAM College Journalism Convention. After long hours of flying on the plane and getting to settle into San Francisco, there was a lot to look forward to.

My first day at the convention, there were a handful of sessions to choose from and we got to attend the sessions we thought would be the most interesting and informative. The first session I attended was about podcasting. Podcasting is something that I enjoy doing for classes that I am currently taking, so I found it very resourceful and soaked in as much information that I could.

The second session that I attended was about social media skills. The session was taught by two college students over at California State in Fullerton. I really soaked it all in, as I do run The Informer’s social media account, along with an intern. They had great information as I plan to implement many of the things that I learned at the session into our account.

After all of the sessions had concluded, we attended a reception where food and drinks were offered. At that reception, we all had met back together as a staff to discuss what we had learned at each session. As we enjoyed the food at the reception, we also enjoyed the ideas that we had all shared together.

The next day I attended another session that was taught by producer, Jesus Ayala of California State in Fullerton. One of my dream jobs in the future is to be a producer. I learned a tremendous amount of the role of the producer and what their jobs exactly entail. After his session, I had stayed after just to learn a little bit more about producing. I felt very great after his session, as I feel like I really enjoyed his presentation.

The last session I attended was one of the most interesting ones that I had the opportunity to attend. The session was called “The Original Fake News.” I really found it entertaining as the session was taught by a member of The Onion. He talked about the power of humor and satire in the news, as I never really looked at news to be comedic. He also had a lot of powerful messages that really inspired me. One thing that he said at the session that I found to be inspirational was to “never stop soaking up inspiration.”

After all of the sessions had concluded, we had all talked about different ideas that we want to work on for the rest of the semester. While there were no sessions taking place, we all adventured around the city of San Francisco as a staff. We enjoyed all of the places that we visited, in addition to the fantastic tips we learned from the College Journalism Convention.