Megan vanVollenhoven and the Art of Showing Up

On February 14, 2025, Megan vanVollenhoven spent part of her day following Delta Air Lines’ CEO communications team. The occasion was Profit Sharing Day. Her account described visits to operational divisions and a chance to see executive communications at work around Ed Bastian. Valentine’s Day had acquired a rather different itinerary: less candlelight, more airline operations.

She thanked Daniel Groce and Danielle Huggins for their support and described the opportunities she had experienced with Delta’s Global Communications team over the preceding nine months. The post catches an early career at a useful moment. Someone who had spent college helping students prepare for professional life was getting a close look at a particular corner of it.

Today, vanVollenhoven works in Atlanta as Delta’s CEO Communications Coordinator. The path there includes a student agency, consecutive national student leadership roles, published writing, and a mentoring connection that kept developing. Follow those steps and the corporate title becomes the latest part of a longer education.

A leadership role before the PR major

In October 2020, while attending Chapin High School in South Carolina, vanVollenhoven was named state president of SkillsUSA. She studied Law Enforcement Services at the Center for Advanced Technical Studies. Two other students from the center joined the state officer team as vice president and treasurer.

The appointment followed virtual training involving the organization’s national office and South Carolina leadership. Before the national PRSSA committee meetings and the airline internship, there was already experience representing fellow students.

Her route into public relations came later. At the University of South Carolina, she studied PR alongside minors in informatics and music industry studies. The combination put information and entertainment alongside the business of communication. It also left her with a course list considerably harder to summarize than a single major.

Her campus activities extended to the Gamecocks Club Field Hockey team, the Carolina Judicial Council, and sorority leadership. As a University 101 peer leader, she helped first-year students adjust to their first semester. An October 2023 biography also credited her with helping grow her PRSSA chapter’s membership by more than 50% during her term overseeing membership.

The campus job with a national audience

In 2023, vanVollenhoven became the first member of South Carolina’s PRSSA chapter elected to the organization’s National Committee. She served as vice president of professional development for the 2023-2024 term. The portfolio included ethics and student-run firms, putting her in contact with students working through some of the same questions she faced on campus.

She was also on the accounts team at The Carolina Agency, USC’s student-run firm. The arrangement gave her a practical point of reference for the national role. She could bring experience with client work into discussions about how student agencies should operate, then bring ideas from those discussions back to her own work.

Her explanation was pleasantly concrete: “Many universities have firms like The Carolina Agency, who do real work for real clients.” For a student communicator, a client supplies something a classroom exercise cannot always reproduce: another person who needs the work to be useful.

Before graduation, a case for practice

In January 2024, vanVollenhoven published an article in PR Daily examining student-run agencies and the experience their members bring into employment. She pointed to students taking on responsibilities in creative direction, account management, strategy, and agency leadership before leaving university.

The argument gives her own campus work a wider setting. A student agency can be a place where people encounter responsibility while still having room to learn. A brief must become a plan. A plan must become something a client can use. The job title might be temporary; the consequences of delivering the work are quite real.

Her writing also addressed professional ethics. In an October 2023 Progressions article, she treated ethical choices as part of student life, campus leadership, and internships. Students, she argued, already make decisions with consequences for other people. Learning to consider those consequences belongs near the beginning of professional preparation.

Read together, the two pieces show the subjects she chose to put before a professional audience: how students gain experience and how they decide what to do with it.

Five students, one campaign

VanVollenhoven was one of five members of USC’s 2024 Bateman Team, alongside Grace Shields, Madi Dramstad, Cooper Redd, and Ella Lesesne. Their assignment centered on Culturs, a multicultural lifestyle network concerned with people whose lives cross cultural boundaries.

The team developed a campus campaign about representation and belonging. It included the Instagram account @culturscola, stories about culturally fluid experiences, and a Culturs Day held on February 27. Programming combined a Greene Street tabling event with a keynote session featuring assistant professor Candice Edrington.

This was a group undertaking, with a named client and a public audience. Its subject required attention to people who might feel poorly represented by familiar cultural categories: military families, expatriates, and others whose experiences span places and identities.

The work adds another dimension to her preparation. Alongside advising student firms nationally, she was participating in a team trying to make a particular campus conversation happen. A campaign has to reach people where they are, even when that means a table on a busy university street.

The internship and the people around it

Her summer 2024 internship took her to Delta’s Global Communications organization. There, she and fellow interns Dara Cadzow and Stella Celentano discovered that all three belonged to Phi Mu, despite attending different universities.

Phi Mu later celebrated their connection, describing colleagues who worked together and traveled abroad together. The account offers a small, human detail amid the formal titles. An internship introduces you to an employer; it also introduces you to the people with whom you will compare notes, make plans, and remember the summer.

VanVollenhoven’s response was enthusiastic about both the experience and her coworkers. It fits the social texture of this part of her story: a move into corporate communications accompanied by connections with people at a similar stage.

Scholarship recognition also marked these university years. She received the Robin M. Urbanski Memorial Scholarship in 2023 and placed second in the Betsy Plank/PRSSA Scholarship in 2024. USC’s 2025 journalism and mass communications awards coverage listed her among summa cum laude honorees. These are separate distinctions, earned alongside the committee roles and project work.

Helping other students find an opening

The next national role was vice president of career services for 2024-2025. PRSSA announced her election in March 2024. The responsibilities moved toward internship and employment resources, career preparation, and connections between students and professionals.

The timing supplied a useful symmetry: she had secured her own Delta internship while taking on a position helping peers prepare for opportunities. Career preparation was both an organizational responsibility and something she was actively living through.

There was continuity with other students, too. In 2025, when Alicia Caracciolo was elected PRSSA international president, vanVollenhoven recalled knowing her since Caracciolo’s freshman year and working with her both on campus and on the national board. She remembered a younger student who attended meetings regularly.

It is a telling detail to remember. Professional organizations are full of impressive titles, but the relationships often start with someone returning to the next meeting. VanVollenhoven had watched that participation develop over several years into another student’s leadership role.

A conversation that continued

One connection in particular helped vanVollenhoven explore the work that interested her. She met Delta communications leader Gina Laughlin through PRSSA. In a February 2025 essay, she described how a Delta conference presentation had introduced her to internal, CEO, and crisis communications.

The relationship continued through her internship and a podcast conversation recorded at PRSSA’s 2024 ICON conference. She also joined the inaugural EMERGE leadership academy cohort, another strand of her professional development while at university.

The podcast episode with Laughlin was published on December 6, 2024. Their discussion covered mentorship, lessons from PRSSA, and the role of the Champions for PRSSA network in supporting students. VanVollenhoven was interviewing someone whose professional world she had begun to experience herself.

“I will prepare students to land their dream internships and jobs.”Megan vanVollenhoven, on her 2024 career services election

By October 2026, Ohio State’s PRSSA programming calendar listed her for a session about making college count. It identified her as Delta’s CEO Communications Coordinator and proposed a discussion of networking, internships, coursework, and involvement outside class. The student preparing for a first opportunity had become someone students could ask about the transition.

That is a fitting place to find her: still in conversation with the community where much of this began. The subjects remain practical. Which experiences helped? What did the internship teach? What should a student do with the time before graduation? Her early career gives those questions names, dates, colleagues, and places. The next conversation has something concrete to work with.