New York, I Love You XOXO

A few months back we stumbled across the Smart Girls Group Summit, a conference at Fordham University in New York City and decided that it would be a fun adventure for the summer! Julianna, Clare (our good friend) and I all took the train down from Boston to NYC ready to attend the Summit and explore the city. Promptly after arriving and checking into our hotel we headed over to Madison and 5th Avenue to do some shopping! The first place we stopped into was Lilly Pulitzer, after that we went to Madewell, Kate Spade, J. Crew, C. Wonder and Sephora. If you are panning a trip to the city any time soon, I highly recommend using Uber, a car service that is cleaner, less expensive and more efficient than a regular old yellow cab.

Walking down the beautiful streets of the Upper East Side definitely channeled our inner Blair Waldorf, plus how could you not stop to appreciate the distinctive architecture? 

The Empire State Building made an appearance on our stroll to Kate Spade

We stayed at the Empire Hotel, as in Chuck's hotel in Gossip Girl which was super exciting and the rooftop view was perfect!

Wednesday morning the conference began, and impressive would be an understatement! Emily, the founder of the Smart Girls Group, did a terrific job organizing the event and speakers. Each panel represented and defined success in a different way, whether it was being the founder/CEO of an organization or a news anchor.  Throughout the two days and 18 hours spend listening to each person speak, I realized that it was their incredible leadership skills and confidence that helped build their success and personal growth. Presenting yourself in a positive and confident way during any aspect of life, professional or not is the key to success.  Other people are impressed by these attributes and will likely want to form new relationships with you. The last panel focused on blogging and branding, which as bloggers we found very helpful. Carly from The College Prepster and Mackenzie from Design Darling who are both incredibly successful and inspirational bloggers spoke. The topic of self branding was discussed quite frequently, as obvious as this may sound all of your social media and blogs are ways of self branding. It is extremely important that you present yourself is a positive and respectable way on all of your sites because colleges and companies will look at them as part of your résumé. Through out the two days we were able to learn a great deal of information about social media, classes recommended to take in college that will benefit you later on in the "real world", steps to build an impressive résumé and the importance of finding a passion and dedicating your career to it. We will definitely be back next year!

A smart girl is inspiring, a leader and fun!

Here are some OOTD pictures from day two of the Conference! Sorry for the bad quality photos in this post, I forgot to bring my good camera so they are all taken on iPhones. 

You know you love us!  

xoxo,

Catherine and Julianna

Preppy by the Sea