Never do a buffet on a Sunday..

Functions... when I agreed to be on this placement I knew this was going to be hard. I don't study functions at university and I sure as hell wasn't being taught it on my Event Management degree.

So now that I'm thinking about it, why on earth I even picked it is beyond me... But Jayne, the be all and end all of Function Managers, made it look so organised and smooth that the thought of me messing up on a regular basis seemed so far-fetched. I'm so organised. I have notepads for just about everything and my training went so well, I wrote everything I possibly could down in those three scattered days. I even trekked to Chislehurst!

However, as the old saying goes: saying something and doing it are completely different things. Because once I actually started to work as a Function Coordinator (I don't say Manager because I'm nowhere near there yet) and as soon as that happened.. it went downhill a bit.

My to-do lists became two pages long and took three weeks to complete, I wasn't spending all my time on Functions. I have done at least six functions in the three months I've been here. But I've also been the barmaid for a month, in the restaurant for a few weeks, a part-time receptionist and run-around for everyone since June. So, you can imagine, when I did have functions it would get put to the back of my mind. 

But although it sounds like I'm complaining or making excuses - I'm not. This is me learning about my place here at The Dukes Head, this is me learning about my placement and how it's COMPLETELY different to my studies. This also shows me that I'm better at events than at functions.

You may be wondering why I have a slightly strange but oddly fitting title but that's because 45 minutes ago I was told that we should never have a buffet on a Sunday because the kitchen has too much prep work for that day. I don't know about you but... I had no idea. Plus, it didn't help that with everything that's been going on lately, I totally forgot to tell my kitchen about this buffet. I'm not in his good books anyway.

So, I've come to this easy conclusion for myself and everyone else: it won't happen again. 
This week alone has been an absolute eye opener for myself and the world of functions. If you get it wrong, you really get it wrong. But cast your eyes back to the first paragraph. I didn't know anything about functions three months ago. Three months ago I was more worried about how I pronounce my words during interviews. And if I would be able to still go out drinking once I started placement (for the record: you don't.).

In conclusion, and in a way to finally feel better about myself so I don't go home crying at how crap this week has been, if I've only messed up a couple of times three months in then I'm doing okay. I'm not bad at this job and I know I can get better and learn more as the months fly by - the damage was small enough that it could be rectified quickly and noone died. I'm doing okay. As long as it's now and not on Christmas Day - we're all good!!!

So never do a buffet on a Sunday folks. Apparently in the World of Functions - that's a huge no-no.


Survival of a University Student =) Tweet

My Event (part. 2)

Our event is over and done with, now a couple of weeks ago I gave you a low down on my 90’s themed event and here is my newest post telling everything that it’s over!

The 90’s night was, thankfully, a huge success – even though we were up against Bedlam – and now here is my chance to actually give you in full detail how this night came about.

According to my group mate, this idea came about by watching the Spice Girls on a laptop and from getting very excited about our childhood and what we remembered from it, Voila! The 90’s night was born – under the original name of “Death of Pop!” It was meant to celebrate the year that Pop died… but as time went on and the confusion of others, the name changed to “I <3 Pop”. Unfortunately, this had to change again to the final “Saturday Night – born in the 90’s.” Expressing the Whigfield classic (don’t act as though you don’t know the dance…) as well as giving the obvious information about the event, it was going to be held on a Saturday and of course, born in the 90’s the main theme.

Promotion and marketing went hand in hand together and for our event our main aim was to bring back nostalgia to students. We bought rainbow dust, ultra violets and lollipop sweets as a giveaway when handing out leaflets.

We held a promotion day with a gazebo in the middle of our university campus blasting out very cheesy tunes from the gym next to us and with hand-made t-shirts (made by our very own marketing manager and her boyfriend) spent most of the day handing out flyers and dancing along to tunes (see pictures). I’m not going to lie to you, I would like to say everyone got involved but it was just me handing out flyers… everyone else was cold and it was freeeeezing!!

We had 8.45am starts handing out flyers at the gate to university, promotion flyerring on the various club nights held at our venue and every night selling tickets at the university halls.

Then, came getting people to come. Now, as we all know, Saturday is a day of doing nothing for the fellow student and we are rarely seen out on a Saturday, unless it’s a house party or there is something ‘Student special’ going on, or, you have money and like a Saturday night out. So, when the news that it was a ‘Reading week’ for a lot of students (which means a week of students all going home) did frustrated us, especially when our whole group trekked around all of halls to sell tickets (myself and a group member getting escorted out because it was deemed as “business” – don’t worry we talked to the warden the next day and she let us come back in).

We had 300 tickets available at the Student Union shop, 100 online and then another 100 or so with us at all times. We hardly sold any tickets with a week and a bit to go. We were stressing, plus, it didn’t help that our lecturers were starting to worry too.

But not to fear, we knew that like a Friday night out most students only ever bought tickets a day or two before the event and most of them would probably get them on the door. However, for our event we had hardly sold 300 in the student union shop two days before our event. Everyone would pop into the shop to ask how many were left or constantly refresh the online ticket page just in case it ever went down.

As luck and life would have it, Thursday saw us go down to 50 tickets online and we put another 100 up by 1pm that day – it did annoy us at first because, naturally we wanted it to go down to a lot less before we put more up, but by that evening it had gone down to under 100 which resulted in us having to put more up on Friday when we realised we had sold just about 400 tickets.

By 8pm on Saturday, our group could only put just under 100 tickets online. Can you believe our luck – I couldn’t explain how it all happened from selling just over 200 on a Wednesday to the Saturday being able to say that throughout the day our total had risen to 700!?

We had spent Saturday dragging our friends/ boyfriends who had come down for the day, redecorating the whole of the club in bright neon cut-out words, CDs, 90’s CD cases and bright coloured cassettes. V.I.P sections decorated with sweets, our brilliant posters and pictures of the 90’s.

Leaving the venue at 5.30pm and coming back for 8.30pm we waited anxiously for our first lecturer to assess us and that was even before everyone else turned up! Thankfully, she was overly impressed with our group – I have to admit, truthfully, we do get on together really well, because we all wanted the same thing - for the event to be a success. If there were ever anything we weren’t happy about, we could always talk about it.

So imagine, 800 of your peers once hearing the song that was a big hit, everyone knew the words to because it was a guy and a girl speaking about a popular girls toy (huge hint)… would you say that everyone erupted with joy and screams and shouts or that everyone turned their head in disgust?

Because if you wanted to go for the latter; you wouldn’t have come to our event. Every so often a classic song would come on and everyone would erupt with excitement! It was crazy!!

Unfortunately again for our group, we couldn’t drink and though we enjoyed the night we couldn't exactly go out on the dance-floor and boogie on down like we desperately wanted to.

By the time our second and final lecturer came to us, it was 1.30am – yes! I’m being serious – I was the one in charge of showing him around the venue and keeping him entertained until he left. There was no way I could not dance to Take That – Never Forget and out-right told my lecturer that I simply loved this song there was no way I could'’t put my hands up when the chorus came on. My lecturer however did not mind at all claiming that the 1990’s were his Master years and he would go out clubbing to the 1990’s music. Result! He even volunteered to come to our event.

He left at 2.15am. Champagne hit our table at 2.19am.

The night ended to us hugging, chanting in joy and congratulating ourselves. We had pulled off a sell-out event!

I’m not going to say that I went to bed that night exhausted but happy but tired and I collapsed in bed with a smile on my face. OH NO! I came back to my house – everyone asleep from already been and gone to my event – shouting at how great my event was. I walked into my bedroom my best friend who had come down just for me in my bed sleeping – I woke her up screaming at how well my event had been, how my lecturers had said to me congratulations to me and was very happy with his stay!!

I WANTED TO SCREAM ABOUT IT! I WANTED TO JUMP ABOUT AND TALK AND TALK AND TALK!!

I had even driven my cab driver crazy talking to him about what he had done, how it had gone and the wreck the venue was after everyone had left.

It was surreal over the next couple of days where our peers are still organising and stressing about their events yet to be put on and ours was over and done with!

The next meeting with our client was the most anticipated… he loved what we did, he came down to see our event and was astonished at the outcome, and more than that, he wanted us to do it again!

Us, second year events students, and a real client wanting us to recreate our event again so more people can come, more profit, more 90’s!

Our client had said to us that he was already going to make profit with his bar sales so the ticket sale profit could go to us. We were almost at the point of fainting we were so happy!

And that’s where our story gets a little confusing because, most of the second year events are for charity and the profit made would go straight to them. But this was different and even though our client said we could keep the money – University laughed at the idea; of course we couldn’t keep the money it’s the clients!

So we’ve been pushing to have the profit of the ticket sales invested into the next event – which is what our client suggested.

Its' not our fault and it's not exactly my university's fault either. According to our client, any of the events that have been put on at this particular venue has never made enough profit to cover its budget. So, this has never happened before - which we all need to take on board as a huge compliment - however, we're all still buzzing off this amazing news and this amazing night that we organised and ran as successfully as we could. We've had heated discussions with administrators who is completely clueless and because we are too - we're all going around in circles because they are leaning towards giving all of our profit away to charity – which is all well and good but not when we can half that money to invest and the other half to a chosen charity of ours.

We've got to wait until Monday so she can figure out what is best. From the talk I had with her, the profit that was made is wholly the clients and so what they do with it is completely up to them. Which then makes us say – then why can’t we have it, because he said he could have it!? But as a university, again, they’re saying “oh my! Oh no! Of course you can’t have it for yourselves…” but then they get stumped… to which we want the rest of that sentence and they can’t give it to us. Legal stuff, contracts, permission etc., it’s all in the way.

So we wait until Monday.

If you wanted to ask me what I learnt from this, it would be that I really think I can do this as my profession. Which sometimes as students I think that’s hard to say. We study a degree in something we like and are good at, something we are interested in but really it’s not what we see ourselves doing in fifteen years’ time. But as an event management course, it’s not something you can just say that you didn’t want to do for the rest of your life because it’s not that kind of course; it’s like a marriage or I guess, more permanently, a tattoo. As well, it’s your personality as I think event managers as much as they can be taught – it’s a hard profession to get into and the person has to be willing to do it.

So what I’ve learnt is that, I cannot wait to do this event again with some great people and hopefully with some money to help us. I’ve learnt to overcome my fear of being in charge of finance  and even though, I’m very slow with numbers and it takes a while to get my head around calculations etc., etc., I think, personally, I’ve done really well in keeping it all together and working out everything in a way that everyone can understand and not lose any money!

I’m overwhelmed at how well we have actually done, I had given up hope of a sell-out event (even though I made a £5 bet that it would), I was happy with about 350 people so we could break even. And I guess as well, for university to know what to do if this sort of situation ever happens again.

That, all our effort, our good team work and just the hard work and thought process we put into every single detail of the event, paid off in such a exploded way that has seemed to dumbfounded everyone; us, the client, our university and now it’s all about how we can all go about this in the correct way that we all win.

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Reflection of my first year at University

I’m about to go into my last exams which start next week (wish me luck!). So, I’m going to ‘reflect’ on my first year, of course the word reflect is silly and I hate having to do it but alas…
As you may or may not know, I started a little bit late at University. I missed ‘arrivals week’ and came into university just before ‘Freshers week.’
My housemates were brilliant at first. When I pressed that doorbell to see two housemates, and I’ll never forget their faces and my house-mate calling to the others that ‘Lauren was here!’ I’ve never seen them run that fast before, even to this day.
My room was large, bare and in the attic. The rest of the night consisted of getting drunk playing Ring of Fire and learning about my 6 other house-mates. I remember collapsing into bed that night thinking that this had been the “right thing to do and why the hell had I even doubted coming to university in the first place.”
The nights out were something to remember. No longer was I in Croydon, I was officially a university student with money to spend, a house with six great people and a course that I was sure I would like.
University was different than I expected; I found out what lectures were really like, seminars were definitely ones not to miss and try to get to know some of my course mates.

I got a job early on, in hindsight, I shouldn’t have done it but I can’t regret it. I got to work in a retail job, something I hadn’t done before and to really see what happens in a shop. Though I didn’t really meet a lot of friends and I really hated it, I tried my best to do a good job. But being a student in my first couple of weeks of starting University I didn’t want to miss out on anything. I would go out with everyone on a Friday knowing I had to get up at 6am the next day. I had done it before back in Croydon, I could do it again but, sometimes you wake up drunk at 6am and stumble into work a state; hung-over included.
I think after the incident with a night out and a week old pasta I re-evaluated everything that I was doing. I stopped going on nights out on a Friday and concentrated on getting more sleep but I think by then I was already really jealous of my housemates being at home relaxing on the weekend.

I may have had a four day week of university but to me it was like I couldn’t ever really relax. Even when I was at home I was still working, I was still in ‘university mode’ I could never switch it off. I thought that having a weekend I could maybe switch it off and actually have some me time.

Maybe I should have planned it out differently, maybe I can’t handle two things at once or maybe a retail job really isn’t for me. I know for a fact that that job didn’t treat anyone nicely – even the managers complained how much they hated it. Mainly it was because I was only a Christmas temp. They weren’t going to keep any of us so why bother helping?
I can probably go on all day about how much it bothered me and though I put it to the back of my mind that I wasn’t going to be let go – it was inevitable. I did get some good things out of that job, the other Christmas temps and some of the younger staff were actually quite nice and I was complimented on how good my customer skills were by the customers. Shame my bosses didn’t see that and only noticed I was putting in the voucher codes wrong…


*
UNIVERSITY WORK
University work turned out to be tougher than I thought, I was struggling early on and it didn’t help that everyone around me were doing well or wasn’t doing anything at all.
Even though I had group work, my first assignment did well but I had the horrible feeling that my group didn’t like the fact that I was so casual about it all. They freaked while I told them that we were doing well. As the weeks went on and the assignments kept on coming with other groups and I learnt that everyone was taking this a lot more seriously than me.
I missed lectures, I missed Financial Reporting a lot and only turned up to seminars and group work because apparently this was fine according to second year students.
They literally told us to get all the late nights and bunking off lectures/seminars done now for second year is a completely different story.
So that’s exactly what I did.

The first year of university doesn’t count towards our final grade; you just have to pass it. All the second year students told us “you’ll sail through first year.”
So why was everyone panicking? It wasn’t until later that a fourth year student told us that in our course you couldn’t just ‘sail through,’ you work hard in all four years.


*
MAKING FRIENDS
I did have this idea that I would have loads of friends in my course and that I would go into Uni a different person. As much as I think I have changed, I didn’t really get the friends in my course.

I suppose it doesn’t bother me too much, I realised that everyone had much better and stronger personalities than what I was used to but also that I was quiet. I mostly listened and smiled a lot. I did get to work with many of my course-mates on group work which got me to talk more and to contribute more. Don’t get me wrong I’m not a loner, I do talk to a lot of my course-mates, we all sit together in lectures and I will always say hello.
If I’m going to reflect, I would say that actually does it matter if I haven’t made best friends with my course-mates? Well yes, because that’s why you take that 20minute journey into University but on the other side is all your housemates that make you smile and it’s not as if I haven’t got other friends elsewhere. I have friends through my housemates and my friends back home.
It’s just that little idea I did have before I came to University had been popped.


*
SECOND TERM
I had made my mistakes and revelled in my good grades by Christmas and after the two week break I was back on form to do the best I could. I still missed lectures but I made it into the hard subjects like economics and financial reporting (the subjects that I should really never do, because I can just about count on my fingers).
I hadn’t gone into my overdraft yet (big smiley face), I was happy to be back with my housemates and the two week break I realised that I didn’t need my parents as much as I thought, most of my mates from back home had stopped talking to me so what was the point? I was happier than I had been in ages.

However, my life was a soap opera. I felt like I lived in Hollyoaks. Drama happened left, right and centre. My grades were still good – I had had two really bad nights out and had been sick once. Little things started to happen though; I was really struggling with economics and financial reporting was a bore.

But you do what you can and you carry on.
University timetable was five days a week, three nine am starts. However, my timetable was four days a week (maybe five), with maybe one 9am start – if I hadn’t turned off my alarm in my sleep.

*
THIRD TERM
By March I was a tad homesick which surprised me. I wasn’t one to get upset about missing home however, I was talking more to my friends back home and little habits my housemates had would bug me.. So going home for the month of April really helped.

I was doubting about going returning to the next year of University though; I had changed my mind about what I wanted to do for a career (something I had had planned out since I was about 14/15 years old). It started when all my lectures and my friend stated this out for me: none of the guest lecturers, people we were supposed to aspire to be like, had degrees or any kind of experience in the field they were working in. They just worked their way from bottom to top. So why was I struggling over a degree when I could go out and gain that experience, working my way from the bottom to the top?

Additionally, it was little things like relatives asking me how my course was going and when I answered “hard,” they all rolled their eyes as if to say that I was obviously lying because University wasn’t hard.
It was weird but I was sick of always doing some sort of school work. I had been doing it since I was 5 and now at 19 years of age, I was sick of it. Irony.
It took some time; my parents freaked out just a little and a horrible career interview (while a tad hung-over, I’m not going to lie) for me to really have a look at what I was doing with my life.
Since then I’ve decided to stay. I’ll get the experience and the degree under my belt and then from there, I can look at where I want to go.

It just takes me a look at my grades so far to tell myself that I’m not actually struggling. It’s just me over thinking it. I’ve got a 1st in Financial Reporting (when two days before I had run down to the beach in a state because I thought that I would fail the test) and I haven’t gotten less than a 2:1 (yet…)

So in reflection, I have a house for next year with five (almost) great people and I pray that my course gets interesting in the second year, come September/ October. I’m gaining a really good experience with good friends, cheap nights out and the only real responsibility is to not kill myself with my own cooking.

So here’s to good grades in my four exams. But most importantly, a good summer getting drunk.

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