Students Natalie Wiesnet, Brad Slavin, Arland Whitfield, and Lexi Madison all got the opportunity to travel to the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. This feed updates daily as they venture through the convention. To follow our journeys via Twitter, check out the hashtage #CUSEdoesNAB
To keep up with all of the official NAB tweets, follow @NABShow! You can also follow us individually on Twitter: @NatalieWiesnet, @BradSlavin, @ArlandWhitfield, and @AlexisMadison20
Day One:
We began our travel day on Sunday. We started out leaving for the Rochester airport around 12:30pm to fly from Rochester to Chicago, then finally to Vegas.
We were all a little tired, and there was a lot of sleeping throughout the day.
We ended up having to stop over in Phoenix on our way to Las Vegas, and that delayed us about an hour. Our travel time for the entire day was about 16 hours. Needless to say, we all went to sleep really quickly that night.
Day Two:
We woke up early in the morning on Monday ready to take on the convention. We all decided that today would be a day where we all just walked around soaking in the feel for the show, and also getting comfortable with the location of the booths that we want to visit more in-depth later in the week. Our first stop was at the DJI booth, followed quickly by the GoPro booth.
We signed up for a few contests (unfortunately walking away empty handed, aside from a GoPro hat and t-shirt Brad and Lexi managed to snag), grabbed some brochures, and spent the afternoon networking and enjoying the Las Vegas weather. Our group also made notes of booths that we definitely want to visit again tomorrow and do some more heavy networking at, along with strategically finding out when give-aways would be happening at various booths.
We ended up leaving the Las Vegas convention center around 6pm to grab some dinner and to watch the NCAA title game… and to watch the episode of Game of Thrones we missed last night.
Day Three:
The morning started off with Brad and Lexi going to a panel talk by the FCC chairman who talked about the future of broadcast, and what that means for TV and radio. Arland and I just walked around the convention center playing with some handheld rigs.
Day three also proved to be a good day for our luck! Brad ended up winning an LED light panel and a really nice portable speaker, Lexi won a 1 terabyte portable drive, and Arland was in the right place at the right time to meet with some CEOs of drone companies and work on a partnership between the companies and Arland’s drone club known as The Skyworks Project.
A cool thing that I got to do was meet with an AVID representative and talk about a new system of their products that I could help carry over to CitrusTV back on campus at Syracuse.
The Nevada sun has also proved a little too much for my skin, and I am sufficiently burned on my shoulders (even though we spend 90% of the day inside). Guess that happens when you’re used to the cloudy Syracuse winters.
Day Four:
With this being our last day at the NAB Show, we all decided to take it easy and see the booths that we knew we all wanted to take one final look at. We hit up Canon, GoPro, and a few other booths, enjoyed the sun outside in a sitting area, and just relaxed.
Over the duration of these past four days, we learned a lot, made a bunch of fantastic contacts, and took a boat-load of knowledge back with us. And from the bottom of each of our hearts, we’re so thankful that the iSchool was able to sponsor the four of us to go this year.
Let’s hope there are more amazing opportunities for more students to go in the coming years!
