I always thought I'd end up in a classroom.

I always assumed higher education meant teaching. I graduated undergrad, started seminary planning to get a PhD in historical theology, and figured I'd spend my career in a classroom somewhere. That was the plan.

What actually happened is that I got a job as a social media coordinator at a small private university while I was finishing grad school. I had photography skills and knew social media, so I started there. And I kept getting promoted. By 23 I was director of marketing. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had great mentors and people who poured into me. Jaime Hunt, who was leading marketing at Winston-Salem State at the time, was one of them. Dr. Steve Condon, the chancellor of my university, was another. At some point he pulled me aside and said: "Devin, there are two paths. Do you want to be a teacher that administrates a little, or an administrator that teaches a little?" That conversation changed everything. I realized I loved the administration side. The strategy, the operations, the communications work, the way it all connected to student outcomes. I stopped planning for the classroom and started building a career in marketing instead.

Seminary wasn't wasted. If anything it's the most useful thing I've ever studied for this work. It trained me to take enormous amounts of complex information and translate it for people who need to understand it, not just scholars who already do. That instinct — making the complicated accessible, making the abstract human — is what marketing actually is when it's done well. Pastoral care and marketing are closer cousins than most people want to admit.

When COVID hit, I lost my job at that small private university. It was disorienting. But I found a position at Forsyth Technical Community College, and it reoriented everything. I had a learning curve coming into public higher ed and the community college world. But the mission resonated immediately. Forsyth Tech exists to help people in our community earn family-sustaining wages. My mom was a community college graduate. Her two-year respiratory therapy degree is what kept our family afloat. I am not abstract about what this work is for.

At Forsyth Tech I built what we call Student Care: a model that integrates marketing, communications, recruitment, onboarding, and student support into one system designed around the arc of a student's actual experience. Not the experience we designed for. The one they actually have. Under Vision 2025, our graduation rate went from 19% to 45%. Minority completion went from 12% to 44%. A lot of people built that. I got to help shape the systems and the strategy.

Now I spend my time thinking about how AI can reduce friction for students and free up advisors for the conversations that actually matter. About how community colleges can tell their story in a world where AI is increasingly where students start their search. About what it means to build a marketing function that genuinely serves students rather than just filling the top of a funnel.

I also teach English as an adjunct faculty member, which keeps me honest. I'm a photographer — landscapes mostly, but also portraits, events, and whatever catches my attention when I'm paying close enough attention. Which, if seminary taught me anything, is the whole point.