Stratton Journals

On Friday, October 10th I attended the alumni event for Elon University Students in the School of Communications. At this event, Alumni were spread out at tables giving advice to future graduates. I was lucky to speak personally with two of the alumni at the event, Daniela Pereyra and Jefferey Williamson.

These two alumni were great in giving advice and helping me traverse what is a stressful time as a soon to be graduate. Daniela is a Real Estate Broker and Jefferey is a freelance photographer. While these two careers are quite different they both had incredible advice that will surely serve me well.

When speaking with Daniela she gave the advice of “get comfortable with being uncomfortable”. Her idea behind this is that when you get comfortable in a career or path your not pushing yourself and in order to grow you have to get out of the mindset that everything is set, you need to work hard at whatever you do in order to grow. Daniela also attributed Elon in the way the school helped build her confidence. When you are offered as many opportunities as Elon does, the position you are set up for is a lot better than most colleges.

I spoke with Jefferey specifically regarding freelancing, as a photographer myself I found he would be the perfect person to get advice from. One of his biggest pieces of advice was to put yourself out there. He coined instagram and LinkedIn as being perfect resources for this purpose. When you want to do photography for a celebrity, reaching out to their main account (with 50+ million followers) isn’t the best approach because most likely they’ll never see the message. But through LinkedIn you can find their publicist and their manager and even their managers assistant. All of these people have less followers on their social media and are much more likely to view and sometimes respond to your requests.

This event was a much need learning session for me. From understanding the benefits that using Elon’s opportunities can have on someones career to learning how to hack the system as an up & coming freelance photographer. I believe this event has given me a huge step forward in chasing my goals.