My name is Alicia Vitagliano and I am Vice President of Philanthropy for the Student Alumni Association at Albertus Magnus College. I am also the President of the Honors Program and a Student Ambassador. I previously attended the Council for Advancement and Support of Education Affiliated Student Advancement Program (CASE ASAP) District I Conference in February of 2017 at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I took quite a bit away from that conference, but I was still so new to my position that I did not know to tailor it to the atmosphere of Albertus. After having the whole second semester of events I really learned how the Albertus SAA functions and creates events.
This all prepared me for the National CASE ASAP Conference that took place in Columbus, Ohio. Seeing how much I had learned from the district conference, I knew this one would be a much larger scale. The conference sessions themselves were great. It really tested the way we look at school organizations. Since Albertus is a smaller institution having less than 500 traditional undergraduate students, most of what we learned at the conference was for much larger schools. Some of the schools I had never heard of, and others were of course very renown. I exchanged contact information with a few people at the conference to stay in touch as we found some 
similarities in our organizations. I found it extremely interesting the other ways that schools had their SAA set up. Some were combined with Student Ambassadors and others were Student Foundations or specifically for Philanthropy. Overall the conference was an amazing experience.
As I returned home with pages of notes and ideas I knew it was the right choice in attending the conference and joining SAA altogether. I am looking forward to the next two years in SAA to make our ideas become a reality.
