Throwback Thursday – To commemorate the 10th year of SXTXState, each Thursday we’ll be featuring past participants in the project. Check back each Thursday until SXSW to find out what SXTXState alumni remember from their time with the project and what they are up to now.

Before she was the social media content manager for HomeAway, Mairin Heard was very much like the other graduate students at the Texas State University School of Journalism & Mass Communication.

Of course, this makes sense as Heard received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the school. During her time at the university, she joined a sorority, was part of KTSW 89.9, the student run radio station, but even more importantly, she was an early member of the elite SXTXState project.

“I guess it was 2009 that I took the course, so it’s been quite a while, but I loved it so much,” Heard said. “I think we were the second year that did the program, and it was such a good opportunity to just get right in the middle of what’s going on during south by.“

Heard said that her biggest takeaway from SXTXState was the mastery of interviewing subjects for writing stories.

“When I did the program…I led the social strategy for it,” she said. “My undergrad was PR, and my grad was new media, and so it was kind of very fitting for me to get that experience.”

She also credited Dr. Cindy Royal as the mentor and leader of the SXTXState program. Heard said that the new media skills that Royal focuses on are exactly the types of skills that today’s companies want from young employees.

Less than a year after graduating, she found the start of her career as a social media specialist in 2011 at HomeAway.

“When I started, and she’s still my manager today, there was one person running social,” she said. “Her background was SEO, so there just basically wasn’t any one running social. We had a Facebook and a Twitter account.”

Heard was essentially a jack of all trades, performing duties such as taking event photos, recording video and controlling all of the content on the US social media channels.

“So I would…write every single Facebook post, every single Tweet, shoot video for YouTube,” she said. “Overtime we’ve grown our team a little bit.”

Now Heard has been with HomeAway for five of its ten years as a business.

HomeAway has drawn comparisons to Airbnb, as a platform for users to rent vacation homes. A major source of HomeAway’s growth has been from acquisitions.

You can find Mairin Heard on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.