The importance of connection

I am extremely lucky to have the friends that I do. They are smart, kind, extremely sharp, and always thinking about ways to improve the lives of those in their circle. At first blush, you’d think this is a rare quality in people today, but when everything aligns just so, you end up with a growing circle of friends who operate similarly.

Last November (2025), when Ashley mentioned a retreat that she and Mallory were developing, I got excited. This is an idea lots of us had thrown around for… probably longer than any of us want to admit. But leave it to them to make it actually happen.

Higher ed marketing is a small community of passionate people. When I was coming up alongside Mallory, Ashley, Seth, and others, we had Twitter. I mean original Twitter. It was only like 2 or 3 years old. Hashtags had just been introduced as canon. Retweets were still manual. We had real, actual connection.

You’d follow someone on Twitter, chat with the wider #hemktg community, and then meet up at conferences. The connection never broke, and the best conversations and inside jokes happened outside of conference sessions. The overprofessionalization of this industry — hell, all industries — has taken a lot of that away from us.

As we progress in our careers, as social media becomes increasingly less social, as we get folded into commodity culture, our circles get smaller. It’s hard to talk to colleagues about challenges and ideas when competition and upward mobility are direct pressures. It’s more difficult to stay at the top of your game, but even worse, it’s hard just to stay connected to the human side of what we’re all supposed to be doing.

People for people

The inaugural cohort of Let’s Go Upstate seemed directly positioned to remedy this. Get about 30 of the smartest higher ed marcomm and advancement leaders in a boutique hotel in Saratoga Springs for three days and see what happens.

What happens is a lot of rest, creative expression, inside jokes, and new friendships.

For me, it felt like those early days of my career when no one cared about titles, and we were all kind of figuring it out. But in reality, a lot of us know what we’re doing and really just need time to share it with other people who get it.

That’s what Upstate gave us: No-pressure time to really connect with our people.

One of my personal highlights was walking to Saratoga Olive Oil Co. with Kathryn Bazella and discovering a mutual love for the criticisms of Walter Benjamin and the philosophies of Roland Barthes. But more than that, I immediately recognized that my brand-new friend Kathryn is a deeply kind person.

Through leading a pizza-making (well, topping… not enough time to teach dough) class, doing some improv exercises, and chatting Enneagram while introducing my dinner companions to Braulio shakeratos, this was all about connection at the best levels.

We were people there for people. We could ignore pretense and work pressure. We could leave room to be curious and inspired. We could devote a few days to being excited for our new friends and our collective new ideas.

So what?

Ashley asked us, “so what?” as we were all reflecting on the few days we had together. My big thought was that we have to keep this going. We have to keep talking to each other. We have to be real friends.

Mallory, Seth, Nick, and Ashley are still some of my closest friends, and we met through work anywhere from 15-18 years ago. In another 15 years, I’m expecting to say the same of this group of people that got together upstate to be a part of this experiment.