2024 AMA International Collegiate Conference
The American Marketing Association hosted its 2025 AMA International Collegiate Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, from April 10 to 12, 2025. This year’s theme was Ready to Launch, and a series of competitions, networking events, speaker sessions, and skill workshops supported the conference. The event has over 300 AMA chapters and 1,500+ students from across North America. On the first day, my team and I made up one of ten teams that presented our case on Sustainability in Marketing to a team of judges. Afterward, we attended the parade of chapters and submitted our designs for the annual tee-shirt competition. On the second day, I attended a College2Career panel held by Vannesia Darby, Marcia Zimmerman, Christopher Hydock, and Josh Owen. They each give fantastic advice for graduating seniors on what to expect from their first job and how to get it. After the panel, I went downstairs to a marketing research symposium. I have only been used to seeing trifold-style presentations in STEM environments, so it was really fascinating to see my peers creating their own projects in my field. Following this, I attended a speaker session by Liza Goldstone, a professional at Google, whose presentation was called “Navigating the World of Ad Sales.” On the last day of the ICC, I attended a workshop called “LinkedIn Hacks from the [in]side: Building and Leveraging a Profile to Land your Dream Job” by David Rosenstein, an Account Executive at LinkedIn. The session was highly informative and entertaining. One of the last sessions I attended on Saturday was “How to put together an AMAzing Marketing Week.” This session featured three different schools and how their teams devised and implemented strategies for the annual marketing week that collegiate AMA chapters are encouraged to host. As a Director of Professional Development for TU-AMA, I have been helping to organize ours for the past two years. Seeing how different chapters approached attendance challenges and organized engaging events was fascinating.
Overall, this year’s ICC was an incredible experience for me. I networked with dozens of individuals, both students and professionals from across the country. I learned more about developing myself professionally and how to help others in my chapter do the same. Hearing unique perspectives on how other chapters run their organizations was refreshing. I was able to reflect on how much time we put into the organization, and seeing the results manifest with hundreds of others who do the same thing was an awesome experience. On the last day, we sat in for the award show, where our case team came in second out of 74 chapters, and we were ranked as a top international chapter of the year. Seeing our hard work culminate and pay off in that moment was so special. I am looking forward to attending more conferences in the future, and I feel more prepared to enter the corporate world having this one under my belt.