My collegiate journalism career peaked last night – and all I could think about what search engine optimization.

I found myself waltzing in a room lined with Facebook-blue covered tables and large screen TVs yesterday afternoon surrounded by the state and the nation’s greatest journalists. We were all there, in a press filing room in UW-Milwaukee’s Student Union while anxiously waiting to hear what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) were going to squabble about tonight.

I was a lowly peasant from the Royal Purple in a room of royalty reporters, photographers and videographers from the AP, CNN and the likes. It gave me hope I would someday return after making a name for myself, while humbling me the instant I walked into the room.

I got physically and mentally swept up in student activists protesting for a student worker’s union. I talked those holding signs in all-caps, “Hillary for Jail 2016.” It was dumb luck that my news team and I happened to be interviewing a member of the UW-M College Republicans as the police forced them to move their table – for the third time that night.

Doing all of this in high heels, may I add.

And this whole time, I was thinking about search engine optimization.

This week’s content could not have come at a better time.

In the beginning of the week, I was looking to figure out how I could optimize my stories when posted to the Royal Purple news page. Last night I was figuring out how I could tweet out the messages of the people around me so they could be seen by the outside world. I consciously thought about how I could write my story in order to get the most viewers possible to the Royal Purple’s website.

I actually pondered the headline I was going to write, in order to make sure it was searchable. Thirteen hours later, I’m studying the analytics.

While I’m pretty sure my college career peaked, my interest in how to increase my online presence piqued, too.