On the 2016 ACTFL Convention: I am incredibly grateful for the support that the AAUSC provided me to travel to my first ACTFL Convention and first national conference. For me, the entire conference experience centered on building relationships within the AAUSC. First, attending the AAUSC French Section Meeting and the AAUSC editorial board meeting allowed me to network with a number of future colleagues whose names I had heard and whose work I had read. Because I am currently transitioning from completing my doctoral coursework to working on my dissertation, it was a great professional experience for me to be able to put faces to names and start to see other AAUSC members as my colleagues. Second, I was able to attend presentations given by other AAUSC members, which sparked ideas for me as a teacher and a researcher. As a teacher, I was profoundly inspired by one presentation on how current events might be incorporated into the language classroom, specifically in the wake of national traumas such as the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo. As a researcher, I continued to grapple with Systemic Functional Linguistics, aided by the presentation of two of the most prominent researchers in the field of genre-based learning. Third, I was grateful to have many of the AAUSC members I met in the audience during my own ACTCL presentation. Having the support and feedback of these colleagues at my first national conference presentation was invaluable! I look forward to continuing to build relationships with my AAUSC colleagues.