Kaitlyn builds leadership skills in Shanghai, China

Kaitlyn Kiepert (Journalism & Digital Media) was accepted as one of 21 students out of over 100 applicants to be a Trade Show Ambassador for the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) Expo Asia 2025.

On the morning of June 28, she stepped out of the plane in China for her week as an Ambassador at the IAAPA Trade Show. Kaitlyn was immediately faced with the bustling foreign thoroughfare. Her first thoughts were, Wow, what in the world have I done? Where am I? She took various taxis, subways, and the famous Maglev train, experiencing travel on a vehicle that uses magnetic levitation, to get to her hotel in Shanghai.

In the hotel lobby, she met the other IAAPA ambassadors, who were from Australia, Europe, France, the Netherlands, China, Asia, and the United States. Their expertise ranged from being managers at Universal and majors in mechanical engineering to being employees in amusement parks.

As the youngest person in the room and a journalism student, Kaitlyn felt so humbled, thinking, I don’t deserve this. How am I here? Yet, the other interns accepted her with open arms, saying, “It’s so cool that you decided to do this out of everything else!”

The next two days were spent in leadership and customer service training.

“We talked about pretty much everything from how to be that ‘first’ face of the company and how to run the membership lounge, sales office, and VIP lounge, to all the different logistics of the trade show,” Kaitlyn said.

On Tuesday, the Trade Show began.

CEOs, executives, and others came from all over the world to attend. Many came to Kaitlyn asking things like, “Where can I get my speaker ribbon for my badge?” or “Where can I find the bathroom?” Kaitlyn focused on being that cheerful professional, the face of IAAPA, while she answered their questions and cycled through different stations. She helped scan badges, seat people, and lead education tours.

“It was very non-stop. I was going from this station to that station and, when I had a pause, I’d visit the show floor,” she said. On the show floor, there were many booths, each with a company trying to sell their product or introduce their company to others.

IAAPA had strict rules for the booths. Kaitlyn would walk through and check for rule violations: people leaving their booths, people with different animatronics in their booths that were jutting out beyond their booth boundaries, and more.

“Learning how to tell hard news positively was such a good skill to work on,” Kaitlyn said. “There were so many times when it’s easy to just go up to someone and say, ‘You can’t do this,’ or ‘You shouldn’t do that.’ Instead, I learned to say something like, ‘Please stay inside of the boundaries of your trade show booth’ or ‘Here, you can go to registration if your tag doesn’t have the right label to get you into the education session.’”

One of the things Kaitlyn got a chance to do was to sit in the back and listen to some of the education sessions on how to enhance businesses. Sitting there across from professionals in the industry, Kaitlyn heard many of them voice the same sentiment: “If you feel so comfortable in your business that you’re afraid to step out and try something new, you will never grow.”

Kaitlyn saw these words of wisdom as something that could be applied to her own life. She admits PHC is her comfort zone, a safe place to be trained and equipped by fellow believers.

“Christ calls us to be in the world and not of it, so we actually have to step out and be in the world. That’s something that really resonated with me. I ask myself, How can I have more of these experiences while I’m at PHC and never treat the summer as just a break from school, but as a time to continue growing and learning?”

 Patrick Henry College exists to glorify God by challenging the status quo in higher education, lifting high both faith and reason within a rigorous academic environment; thereby preserving for posterity the ideals behind the "noble experiment in ordered liberty" that is the foundation of America.