I always had an eye for marketing, I just didn't know it yet. Summers spent lifeguarding at a local waterpark, I'd spend my days off trying (and trying, and trying) to get a geotagged Snapchat filter live for the park. It felt like a real win when it finally worked.

That instinct resurfaced in high school on Student Council, one of the first times I did real marketing without having a name for it yet. Our board was handed a dying tradition, the winter dance, and asked to bring it back. We recruited students from different clubs and sports teams to act as influencers for our print and social campaigns, which in hindsight made us early adopters of a tactic well before it went mainstream. Ticket sales went from 70 to 1,200 in a single year, an early sign of where my instincts were headed.

In college I still didn't know where I was headed professionally, until a marketing elective clicked in a way nothing else had. It was too late to change my major, and COVID was just starting to upend everything, so I set my sights on graduate school instead. I earned my MS in Marketing from DePaul University, graduating with High Honors.

During grad school I started interning at Janko Hospitality and was kept on afterward, taking on more responsibility until I was managing paid media, email, graphic design, and social for a portfolio of 12 hotels and 3 restaurants across the Chicagoland area, spanning Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, and IHG, with the help of my manager and mentor, Liz. Along the way I became part of several property rebranding efforts, helping carry new brand identities through everything from signage to social content, and I took the lead on our quarterly content shoots across the portfolio.

Those quarterly shoots are where my early adopter streak showed up again. Social media was mid-shift from static images to video as the dominant format, and I leaned in early, treating video as a priority at every shoot instead of an afterthought. My favorite result: a full shoot at The Forester Hotel, filming the entire property to create a hero video for the website that we also cut down for social.

We ran full service digital marketing campaigns with paid spend for all 12 hotels and 2 of the 3 restaurants, and I was hands on with the strategy behind them, from building out creative for the ad sets to researching new keywords to target. Every month I also handled reporting on those campaigns, sending results to the executive committee as well as the General Managers and Sales Directors at each property, and I put together a portfolio wide report each month for the executive committee and ownership.

One goal stayed constant through it all: moving to Los Angeles. I've since made the move, and I'm now looking for what's next.

Outside of work, I'm a bit of a movie fanatic, I have an AMC A List membership and make it to the theater about once a week. I love traveling and being outdoors, I'm into photography, and I try to keep up with everything happening in tech. Most of all, I love spending time with my friends and family.