Travel Alumni Spotlight: Turning Passions Into Careers

Sylvia Weiler, general manager of advertising sales for the tourism vertical at Sojern, moved to San Francisco in the late 1990s during the dot com boom after leaving Bulgaria where acting taught her that putting on a good show is a lot like selling an ad. Working with film studios in Washington, D.C. like Warner Bros. Pictures is where Sara Morgan, founder of Eleven Eleven PR, which has several travel clients, realized she could make any brand seem relevant. Studying broadcast news in college supported this developing philosophy of hers at the time. Morgan drafted press releases about movies and needed to make them seem like blockbuster hits even if that wasn't to be their destinies. Both Morgan and Weiler found their own inspiration to help them tell a brand's story, and in doing learned how to better convey their passions. When students leave their college days behind, it's up to them to continuously discover how to be their own advocate. They must make the decision each day to look at the big picture of where they want to go in a career and find the missing puzzle pieces to keep moving forward. The Travel Alumni Spotlight is part of our State of Travel Education series, focused on showing how universities are preparing the industry’s future talent to be thought leaders and innovators. This spotlight highlights individual stories to offer lessons on how people reached their current positions and how their education impacted their c