Away from freezing Murfreesboro, Tennessee, various MTSU faculty and administration gathered in hot and sunny Los Angeles on Saturday to celebrate another year of student attendance at the Grammy Awards and to honor the alumni living in the area.

The yearly “MTSU Honors Brunch” serves as a networking experience for alumni in the LA area and the six students on MTSU’s annual Grammys trip.

MTSU President Sidney A. McPhee; Mark Byrnes, the MTSU provost; Beverly Keel, the dean of the Scott Borchetta College of Media and Entertainment; Andrew Oppmann, the MTSU vice president for marketing and communications; and Michelle Conceison, the chair of the MTSU recording industry department, attended the event at the Godfrey Hotel rooftop bar and congratulated the students for being chosen to go on the trip.

More than 30 guests were in attendance, with alumni bringing along some coworkers — some of whom were in the music industry — and family members.

Students, faculty and alumni converse during the annual MTSU Honors Brunch in Los Angeles on Jan. 31, 2026 (Jenene Grover)

“It’s been so inspiring, and as much as this has been a dream trip, it was refreshing to have a reality check that this could be our lives out here,” Emily Eastep, an MTSU senior majoring in music business, said.

The faculty in attendance thanked all for attending, and Byrnes said that the alumni are testaments to the programs at MTSU and that the students in attendance are testaments to the hands-on opportunities.

“Especially seeing people who have come from our exact program and our exact degrees, doing exactly what they wanted,” Anna Shinholster, an MTSU student majoring in commercial songwriting, said. “And what some of them were saying was that there may be a lot of opportunities that come up and they don’t work out, but that shouldn’t be any reason to stop, and the most important thing is to keep going, and it is possible.”

For all the students, the networking event removed some previous fears of their job prospects and attainability of their careers.

“I think a lot of us have this internal narrative or myth of the music industry being one that’s really hard to get into,” Colman Connolly, an MTSU senior majoring in audio production, said. “Whenever we hear about people working in the music industry, it feels almost like a legend or something, and this was a way to see how people have manifested it in their own lives in very real ways.”

One alumni in attendance, Daniel Carter, went on the Grammys trip three years ago and now works in LA in the music industry. Gabriela Diaz, an MTSU senior majoring in audio production, found it inspiring to see him attend the event after having been in the students’ same position just a few years prior.

“He’s actually out here doing the thing,” Diaz said. “… I thought that was really cool to see. Like, that’s us. This is what lies in our future.”

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