It all started when...

As far back as I can remember, I have been playing around with media. From photos and videos of friends and family, to my own social media-esque platforms for me and my friends to use and communicate with, to blogs and advocacy websites, I have been playing around with building and creating media as far back as I can remember. This sparked an interest in writing, both creative and professional, and grew into intricate story telling including photos, video and other mediums.

When I entered college, I began to stray from writing, choosing science as my more practical focus and keeping writing to a creative minor. However, I quickly found and applied for the CSU campus paper, The Rocky Mountain Collegian, which took up much of my undergraduate career and reignited a passion that has not been quenched since. Whether it is reporting, visual mediums or social media, I've been avidly addicted to the field and I don't think I'll quit any time soon. 

Here is a collection of some of my works. Please click on a link to see a specific skill or scroll to see my whole journalistic portfolio.

Reporting 

I was sitting in a trailer that my grandpa owned, around 6 years old, in the middle of nowhere on a crisp fall evening. At the fold out table sat my Dad, who sat across from me, fielding my many questions with patience and amusement. My questions may have seemed random to him, but an hour later, in his lap, was a short focus piece about the tidbits of his life, with a scribbled crayon cover and several pages on how amazing my Dad, the real estate consultant, cancer survivor, was a neighborhood treasure. 

Little books like this continued. I wrote a feature piece on the amazing feats of my cat, Lily, and how cuddly she was. I wrote a fictional piece about a Princess that had to pick a Prince via a popular dating show because her parents wanted her to get married. I had been bitten by the writing bug, and it was an itch I was always willing to scratch. 

One of my teachers recognized my desire to chronicle little tidbits of life, and towards the end of the first semester of my 5th grade class, she approached me and a few other similarly minded students, asking us if we wanted to  report on our family history and win the chance to be in a published book. After interviewing my paternal grandmother and a grueling 12 months of edits and labor, I was one of about 20 children to win the contest. This led to my first time on television, a book launch at Tattered Cover, and my first published report at the age of eleven. As you can see, the thrill never wore off. 

Here are a few of my clips that I am most proud of 

Photography

From a young age, I've always had an interest in photography. My mother worked as a commercial photographer before I was born, and maintained an interest up until she became a high school photography teacher when I was in middle school. Seeing her running everywhere with a camera piqued my interest at a young age.

From my first combination camcorder/camera at the age of 10,  I was hooked. I took low resolution pictures of everything that moved, and quite a few things that didn't. I gradually grew better, as I advanced to more complex cameras and higher quality shoots. But as my friend and colleague, Skyler Stanley always likes to say, it's the photographer that matters, not the camera. 

I am proficient in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom
and can use both Nikon and Canon cameras

Here is a collection of some of my favorite pieces 

Videography

I've grown up in the generation of videos. From YouTube vloggers to rise of the video-centric Facebook algorithm, video content is something that I consume and enjoy daily. 

Videos are also something that I've loved to play around with. From a young age, I messed around with animations, video shows with my friends, and videos of family vacations. This was the era of popular shows like iCarly and Fred, people who made videos with their friends and in turn became sensations. This was something that I already had loved to do, so it only drove me to become better. 

Video is something that I would like to explore more of. I took a video editing class, but because of they copyright claims on the footage used, I cannot publish them on this site. I hope to have more footage to share with the public in the near future.

I am proficient in Adobe Premiere, After Effects, and Audition,
and can use light kits, audio equipment,
digital SLR cameras, and most video cameras

Here is a selection of my videos to date

Web Design

Web Design is something that I have been doing since the moment I touched a computer. My first "jobs" would be small errands and tasks for my dad's business, and some of this included helping him proof his website. This evolved into making websites for middle school and high school projects, then into making advocacy websites and an interactive blog that had an atmosphere like that of early social media websites. One of my advocacy sites for animal cruelty awareness reached singer Sarah McLachlan , who signed a printout of the website and sent it to me. My very first site, a site that had message boards and blogs that I shared with friends, celebrated it’s tenth anniversary in October 2018. Web Design has been a part of my life for those ten years.

Eventually I started doing websites for clubs, small businesses and other personal websites.  I've used almost every type of web design program, from Squarespace to Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org to building it from scratch with HTML, CSS and Java in Adobe Dreamweaver. 

I have created whole websites using a variety of software, including Dreamweaver, Squarespace, Wordpress.com, Wordpress.org and Webs.com

Below are two of my recent creations. I have two more under production

Social Media

Social media is something that my generation has both embraced and mastered. Although I was not an early adopter of social media due to the household rules, I was a quick learner, gaining over a hundred followers the first day that I joined Facebook. 

In high school I dabbled with being an admin on several fan pages for shows or games series that I liked, managing up to five pages at a time, some with as few as 500 followers and my largest being over 24,000 followers. 

This evolved into a love for brand management. For about 4 months, I had a summer internship for the Fort Collins Brown Shoe Fit Co., a chain of shoe stores that had a franchise in town. I worked for the owner, who was retiring at the end of my program, but who wanted to boost their social media platforms. They had a Facebook with a few hundred members and a MailChimp, but nothing else. He wanted to help drive younger traffic, so he needed help. 

When I came on, I helped redesign their website, created their first Instagram and Twitter pages, and began to post from them avidly. I took trends that were popular at the time, such as Pokemon Go, and used them to help drive younger viewers to their page through boosting these more culturally relevant posts on Facebook and making sure they were optimized for search. This drove more viewers to their web pages, doubling some of their follower accounts. Unfortunately, the intern after me wiped their social media accounts and removed my name from their website design to give herself a clean plate.

I also worked as an editor for the Collegian, and part of my job was making sure the posts were not only ready for print, but had good pictures, were optimized for searching, and were shared on social media in a way that invited people to read them and made them easily shareable. 

I am proficient at Facebook, Facebook Page management, Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Medium, MailChimp, Youtube, and Vimeo. 

I also completed a course in Social Media Management, scoring among the top of my class and creating a full brand analysis and social media plan for a small online blogger as our group social media final. With their permission, I have included below our social media final.

For more information on my social media work and references for former colleagues who worked with me as social administrators, please contact me directly. 

I have used the following programs with audiences of 24,000+ followers to communicate for a variety of brands and businesses

Direct Marketing

Since May of 2018, I have been working at Wiland, a business intelligence and data-driven marketing co-operative out of Longmont that provides direct mail, email and digital solutions for various companies through modeling their data or creating custom audiences.

I started as an intern, helping define and create audiences for their UltimateAudiences campaign, as well as descriptions to help explain the audience to potential partners.

I was promoted to full time Marketing Coordinator for the Strategic Audiences team in July of 2018.

My main responsibility is in copy writing and editing for the team, specifically assisting in naming audiences and using audience attributes to write high-quality, compelling descriptions. This requires me to maintain a fast pace to meet weekly writing goals,-proofread and edit other writers' work to optimize copy while assisting in audience tracking and completing other marketing copy assignments. When I’m not helping with copy, I use approved descriptions and attributes to assign photos to audiences, help associate audiences with potentially relevant brands, and provide additional assistance as needed to the Strategic Audience team or assist in various marketing related projects as needed.

This job has exposed me to the direct marketing world and shown me the back end of the creation of audiences. This is important to any company, who work hard to find their niche demographic and target audience for their products. I truly believe this will help me help other brands in the future.