Being a good sport Part 4

So this is it! My last day of work experience was finally here, but I still had a few things that needed to be finished. The Vice Chancellor's shield presentation is this Friday and I had to make sure that everything for the event was finalised and triple checked!

VIPs had responded to their invitations, gourmet food platters have been orded, trophy has been polished... Now for the hard part.. the run sheet and the speach notes! Every minute of this event has to count, my boss Stuart carefully informed me. We have an olympian hockey roo presenting the award and a highly acclaimed professor opening the event... haha no pressure right?

On the up side this event has been run every year for a long time, so let's have a big hooray for templates! But still my margin for error was ridiculously small if that. The hardest part, like writing anything was simply getting started, then the next task was making sure that every minute of this event had been planned and nothing had been missed. I think I have read my run sheet about 50 times so far, going over it with a fine tooth comb each time.

When I was done, Stuart then went over everything while I sat there and stressed. But luckily for me he seemed quite impressed and did not find any errors. YAY!

My last task to finalise was much more relaxing, I had to teach Stuart about the 'insights' section of our facebook pages. Or the 'weird swiggly graphs' that have no meaning according to him. I explained that when a status or an event is posted we can monitor how many people engaged with our post and what our reach was. He sat there and looked extremely lost. It took a while for him to understand that it is a great way to guage the successfulness of the facebook page. When he did finally get it, he was like ooooooh so that's what you have been doing every morning, I thought you were playing some kind of game. *sigh*

One thing I have definately noticed is that although he knew social media was vital when communicating with his target publics he really had no idea how to monitor and evaluate whether it's actually working. To me this seems crazy but it makes me wonder how many business out there are doing much the same thing...

I hope you all had as much fun as I did!

Bye for now
Jade

Being a good sport - Part 2

After all the data entry, photocopying, lecture drops and flyer runs the best part of my job has come along! Planning events for University Games, I am so excited!  Uni Games as they are more commonly referred to are held each year in a capital city in Australia where each of the major universities compete in various sports and disciplines.

This year the games are in Adelaide, South Australia from the 23^rd to the 28^th of September.  After doing lots of the nitty-gritty stuff the last few days, my next task includes planning an information session, planning a fundraiser event at a nightclub, promoting these events and making sure they run smoothly.  I am thrilled because it is the first time during this experience I will be able to have a bigger role in the decision making about these events.

Honestly the biggest challenge I have had so far is learning how to make a good poster! It sounds really easy but to get it looking like a proper poster and not a primary school finger-painting is not as easy as I thought it would be. Other than that the response has been quite good so far, luckily for me Uni Games has quite a reputation in itself so I have not really had to try too hard to get our publics interested.  The only hard part about the reputation is most students see it as a cheap holiday with their mates, to drink party and be merry.  Essentially that is a part of it, but we also want to win some sporting events as well.

My next challenge will be to curb the reputation a bit, make it more about quality sporting than just partying.  I will be working with the Elite Sporting Manager next week to discuss strategies and see if we can snare any state or national players to give Curtin a fighting chance.

Until next time,

Jade Fairbairn