I often wonder how many people actually set out to become conference planners. Did anyone, at age six, announce, “When I grow up, I want to manage breakout rooms and banquet orders”? Yeah… probably not.

I certainly didn’t. I went to college with grand visions of becoming a lawyer — the whole courtroom-drama, objection-your-honor, briefcase-in-hand fantasy. I got a paralegal degree, a BS in Sociology (with a concentration in Criminology and Deviance, because that just sounded cool), and eventually an MS in Criminal Justice. I was all in. Until reality — and Sallie Mae — hit me square in the face.

Somewhere between realizing how much I owed in student loans, taking in my 14-year-old sister, and facing the fact that quitting my full-time job for law school wasn’t exactly financially feasible, I took a detour. A big one.

My first “real” job was with a mid-sized nonprofit that held a huge annual conference every summer, plus a handful of smaller events throughout the year. I started as an administrative assistant — you know, the person who knows where everything is and fixes the printer when it inevitably jams. Pretty soon, I became the assistant to the Conference Coordinator. (Sounds fancy, right?)

Over the next five years, I worked under five different coordinators. Yep. Five. It was like watching a revolving door in slow motion. Each time one left, I took mental notes: “Okay, that approach worked… that one, not so much.” When the fifth coordinator packed up her stapler and left, I was promoted to the role. And honestly? I was terrified.

Would I be another “one and done”? Turns out — nope! Fifteen years later, when I finally moved on to new opportunities, I was the longest-running conference coordinator that organization ever had. Take that, revolving door.

Somewhere along the way, I discovered I had a knack for this whole event-planning thing. My paralegal background came in handy when reading and negotiating contracts. My even-keel personality helped when navigating cranky vendors or a client who wanted the impossible (“Can we fit 300 people in that 100-person room?”). Before I knew it, conference planning had become my thing.

If you had told 20-year-old me that I’d grow up to be a conference manager, she’d have laughed. Hard. “That’s not a real job,” she’d have said, probably while highlighting case law. Back then, I thought people planned weddings or birthday parties — not multi-day conferences with thousands of people, 30 breakout rooms, and more coffee than should be legally consumed.

Even today, when someone asks what I do for a living and I tell them I’m a conference manager, I usually get a polite smile and a puzzled look — like I just told them I train squirrels for a living. Most people assume conferences just magically happen. Spoiler alert: they don’t.

So grab your coffee (or something stronger), and come along for the ride as I take you behind the curtain into the wonderfully chaotic, occasionally ridiculous, always unpredictable world of conference planning. It’s not always glamorous — in fact, it’s often spreadsheet-heavy and sleep-deprived — but it’s also funny, fulfilling, and full of stories worth telling.

Welcome to The Life of a Conference Planner — told by someone who never saw it coming… but wouldn’t have it any other way.

— The Anonymous Planner