Welcoming Future Event Pros To Our Office

 
One recent Friday we had the pleasure of welcoming a group of future colleagues from the Collins College of Hospitality Management at Cal Poly Pomona to our offices. We had a great time sharing our knowledge with the students on their field trip.
It was an educational experience for all of us!

Alisa Walsh, Director of Business Development: 

"We had been invited by our friends at the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board to provide the students with a site visit of an event production company because we have our design and production studios in-house. Every event we produce is put together here, step by step, all in on place, in South L.A. It was an honor to participate and welcome this energetic and curious group of students."

In order to provide all 40 attendees with an in-depth and close-up experience during their 45-minute visit we organized them in three rotation groups.

Alisa: "Ted, Kristen and I gave the group an introduction to the production process from A to Z. Kate and Brynne offered students a tour of our decor and floral design studio. Carolyn and Max welcomed everyone to the warehouse where our team was working on the construction of customized set pieces.
We all participated in very lively Q&A sessions which also proved to be very informative for us."      

           

Brynne, Kate, our office canine Beatrice, and Max present our Decor and Floral Design Studio.  

Sasha Tani, Director of Destination Services at L.A. Tourism & Convention Board:

"The purpose of this site inspection day was to familiarize students with various supplier partners to understand the behind-the-scenes of executing an event. In addition, students got the opportunity to learn of different career paths in the Hospitality industry.

It was a pleasure bringing the next generation of event planners to EventWorks to showcase all the moving parts that go into producing large scale and special events. The students really loved seeing all the departments from sales, to floral design, to props, and all the people that it takes to make the final event come together."

Alisa Walsh: "It was very interesting and refreshing for us to discuss our work with such a motivated group and we gained new insight into our process by learning about it from an outside view. We got very interesting questions from the group, that resulted in discussions related to everything from the cost of events, sourcing creative ideas to work-life balance, a topic that was much on the mind of the students as our work schedule does not fit into a Monday-Friday 9 to 5 time frame. Future event producers need to know that it is more of a work-life integration instead of balance. But this industry is a lot of fun and very fulfilling to creative minds."

If you are interested in an event industry career, you should consider attending the Collins College!  Here a very short description:

With over 1,000 undergraduate students, the college is the second largest of its kind the country. Founded in 1973, it was the first hospitality management studies program in California and its thousand students make it the largest such school in the state. As of 2010, The Collins College of Hospitality Management is ranked third in the nation by restaurant executives. With over 1,000 undergraduate students, the college is the second largest of its kind in the country.

Thank you to Sasha Tani and the LATCB for including us in this program!

Warm regards,

Janet