Reflection 3: Open Day meeting

Greetings everyone!

Open Days are a fantastic opportunity to find out if you like a university or not. They is a chance to meet potential professors, see the libraries that could become part of your daily routine, check out where you could be living and meeting other senior students.

Open day is one of the major highlights at Curtin Sarawak throughout the year. As much as it may seem it’s easy to plan out, it’s actually not.

It’s just another normal Friday. I walk into the office and Mr Nicholas Leong calls me to his office. “Preet, would you like to join us for our Open Day meeting later?” not hesitating I said yes.  This was my opportunity to actually see how Curtin works as a team to prepare for an event.

During the meeting, the committee was elected where Mr Nicholas Leong is the Chair and the Co- chair is Ms Marcella Ginder. As the discussion proceeded, Mr Nicholas Leong welcomed everyone to the first Open Day meeting and thanked everyone who joined the committee. The date of the open day is set to take place on the 14 September 2013, on a Saturday and themed ‘Make Tomorrow Better’.

During this meeting, the Chair had pointed out that the PR & Publicity team should work independently. Looking at the post-mortem of last year’s open day, the PR & Publicity team only played a tiny role. One of the issues pointed out were, lack of sponsors and entertaining events.

Coming back to what I have learned, there are good meetings and there are bad meetings. Bad meetings are never ending, you never seem to get to the point, and you are left wondering why you were even present. Effective ones leave you energized and feeling that you have really accomplished something.

Three things that affect an Effective meetings:

1.       They achieve the meeting's objective.

2.       They take up a minimum amount of time.

3.       They leave participants feeling that a sensible process has been followed.

Meetings should be structured in a way that the planning, preparation, execution, and follow up result to an effective meeting.

*Golden Rule:

·         To run an effective meeting is to insist that everyone respects the time allotted.

·         Start the meeting on time; do not spend time recapping for latecomers

·         Whatever can be done outside the meeting time should be (circulating reports for people to read beforehand, and assigning smaller group meetings to discuss issues relevant to only certain people).

This was my first experience attending a real meeting during my internship and I have learned a lot and the most important things in just one meeting.

Best regards,

Parvither Preet Kaur

Curtin Sarawak

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