Week 4 — Personal Contributions

This past week was my busiest week so far, which was nice because there was a lag the week before.  We had a huge end of year gala for Team Excel to celebrate the students and mentors for all of their hard work.  The program director for Team Excel who I worked under this week was amazing, and she gave me a lot of responsibility.  I got to explore fields that I wasn’t expecting to get experience with like event planning and graphic design.  I never considered either of those as a potential career, but after receiving praise from my boss, I want to look into and maybe apply to some event companies or experiential marketing type jobs.  I was in charge of designing certificates for every student, ordering trophies for five main award winners, creating all of the media for the awards presentation and slide show, curating a playlist, ordering decorations, ordering party favors, and securing volunteers.  I really enjoyed having so much to do. It made me realize that I am much more high functioning when I don’t have a chance to slack off.  Something that I observed during the planning of this event and want to make sure I am hyper-aware of is other people’s time.  The woman I worked under had a lot going on and was very stressed during the weeks leading up to the event.  For the slide show, there were certain things I needed like a list of names for the students, the awards they won, and all of their pictures.  When we would talk on the phone and she’d ask if I needed anything else, I’d remind her about all of those and she would say like yes of course I’m so sorry I’ll send that to you right away, but she got distracted.  I ended up working Saturday and Sunday and staying up until 3 in the morning the night before the event because she finally gave me all the information she had and asked if I could facebook/LinkedIn stalk people who she didn’t have pictures for.  It would have been a lot better to have been able to do all of that during work hours, but allegedly that’s the life of an event planner.  It was all worth it when she expressed her gratitude and said the event would not have been up to her standards of excellence if I had not been so on the ball and efficient.