Career Events and Activities
For the semester of Spring ’26, I attended three professional or career related events here at Kennesaw State University. The three events I chose were Passion Projects with Janice Overbeck, SAUPO (Symposium on Asia-USA Partnership Opportunities), and the launch of KSU’s center for interactive media! I chose these events for a number of different reasons some being: general interest, professional applicability and advice, or because they just looked fun. You can find a brief description of my experience with the events below.
Event #1: Passion Projects with Janice Overbeck here @ KSU
March 24th, I had the chance to sit in with Dr. Haimes-Korn’s Masters in Professional Writing classes where we had the opportunity to hear the guest speaker Janice Overbeck. Janice Overbeck is a prominent Atlanta-based real estate entrepreneur, CEO, philanthropist, and documentary filmmaker focused on environmental and social issues. We had the chance to hear about her professional journey up to that point: she started with her business degree within the field of real estate, used those skills learned to begin her own house flipping business, pursued(ing) higher education, leading her to start her own real estate team allowing her to pursue her passion projects. Passion projects are endeavors and pursuits that Overbeck considers professional but inherently personal. Often times professionals find themselves in careers that they enjoy, yet they feel a drive towards other pursuits as well. In Overbeck’s case, her passion projects would be philanthropy and film. Over the course of her talk, she mentioned not to lose those outside passions, but to let your professional career fund them and support them.
I had the pleasure of attending the Symposium on ASIA-USA Partnership Opportunities (SAUPO), organized by KSU’s Asian Studies Program, on Friday, April 17. SAUPO continues to be the largest Asia business conference in the U.S., with alternating conference locations in Atlanta and Asia, but this year KSU had the awesome opportunity to host it on campus. SAUPO is an event where Asia Pacific business leaders, investors, policy makers, diplomats, community leaders, and students come together to network, hold conversation, share culture, and one of my favorite parts… listen to amazing jazz music. The conference took place from 9am to around 6pm, so it was an all day event split up into multiple different sections: keynotes about business, sustainability, Artificial intelligence, concerts, networking opportunities, and food. It was a wonderful, immersive culture experience as well as an eye opening professional introduction to the world of international opportunity. It was an important take away for me that reaching the international professional sphere is not something that is impossible, in fact it’s surprisingly thriving with opportunity. I really want to see the world and am deeply interested in international opportunity/impact, so it was enlightening to see the possibilities out there for me.
Event #2: SAUPO (Symposium on Asia-USA Partnership Opportunities)
Event #3: Celebrating the opening of The Center for Interactive Media @ KSU
On April 27th, I got a chance to attend the student launch event for The Center for Interactive Media (CIM) at Kennesaw State University’s Marietta campus. The CIM is a brand new media center that will provide the utility of classrooms, labs, research, networking, and collaboration all within the focus of hands-on interaction with the new technologies shaping our world and economy. With this new addition to the campus, they aim “to accomplish five goals which include: 1) Training the next generation of researchers in digital innovation. 2) Advancing interdisciplinary research in interactive media. 3)Developing and evaluating immersive experiences through applied research. 4) Integrating ethical, human-centered AI into interactive systems. 5) Bridging research and practice through industry and community partnerships”. The event allowed the attendees to demo some of the new equipment students and faculty will be using in their studies/research to develop modern strategies and solutions to ever progressing needs, questions, and problems; for the demos, my favorite was the virtual reality headsets! It was an extremely fun and immersive experience into some of the technologies that might become as essential as our cellphones are to daily life today. The event also featured speakers from KSU faculty that presented some of their research concerning these new technologies, professionals of international reputation from companies like Unity, and other Georgia professionals.