Retail Seminar 2013
The
event was held for the retail students on 17th July 2013 at Seminar
Room B.203, B.203A and B.204. Talks from companies namely
Groupon, Bugis Street and Iora Fashion were given by respective representatives
to brief students more on how retailers operate.
The
overall In-Charges for this event were Bok Gim and Bo Tai. We received assistance from our fellow EMRS members in executing the event. We basically had to
inspect the area, come out with a floor plan, decide on the locations of the
poster stands, work on the programme rundown and allocate manpower.
Pre-event
2 days before the event
We
received the additional chairs that we needed from the movers. We also helped
out with the unwrapping of the chairs.
A day before the event
Along
with some helpers, we set up a day before the event to complete the decorations
partially and the arrangement of chairs. The packing of goodie bags were done
on 16th July 2013 by team 3 members. There were a total of 140 door
gifts. The items in each goodie bag varies between “Dettol hand sanitizer”,
“Osmo Essence hair wax” and “Osmo Power Dust”.
We pasted the signages on the retail seminar
doors to ensure every student and speaker know which room that they were
supposed to go to. We put up the class allocation signages on the poster stands
so that during registration, students were able to know which registration
counter they should register at.
Reserved tags were also printed and pasted on
the chairs in the first rows of each seminar rooms to make clear that only
guests and VIPs could sit.
Actual event day (17th
July 2013)
On the
event day, we gathered all the helpers at 9a.m. in EMRS room and brought them
to the seminar lounge (B.204). We divided them into 2 groups-Seminar
Room Decorations and the logistics. The helpers helping out in seminar decorations
were supposed to complete the entire decorations whereas the logistics helpers had to
bring up the necessary logistics.
Overall
Here is a snapshot on how our overall decoration in Seminar Lounge looked like.
Catering
The caterer arrived at around 12:05 p.m. One of us directed him up to the Seminar Lounge to set up the refreshments. The In-charges instructed him to put the refreshments closer towards the windows to make sure that there were enough pathways for students to walk through on both sides. There appeared to be more food than the tables could hold, thus the caterer placed the carton of food on the couch temporarily. We shifted the food on the tables when there were spaces not long after.
Registration started at 1:30 p.m but at 1.15pm students were already coming into
the seminar lounge. The registrars took their attendance and directed them into
their respective rooms. There were students who were not clear as to which
class they were in and we had to help them look for their names on each class
lists. We had OSEP students whose names were not listed, thus we had no idea
where to allocate them. Therefore, we added their names manually under one of
the class lists and had them joined the room with more seats available.
Unfortunately, there were students that sneaked away after taking their
attendance.
Before
the talk, all the runners had to upload the presentation slides from the speakers
as well as the students. We also uploaded the song playlist into the desktop and
played it at 1:00 p.m. We had to ensure that every slides’ hyperlinks and videos or
pictures were able to function. We had to fade the music when the talk was
about to start.
During the talk, the runners had to stand by for any technical issues. There were insufficient chairs and we had used up all our backup chairs and to give up 3 of our registrars’ chairs for the students.
During Breaktime at 2:45p.m, registrars at counter 2 played the breaktime playlist and ushered the students out for refreshments. They were ushered back into their rooms once the breaktime was over.
Registrars and runners assisted in dividing the door gifts according to the number of students present in each room. We realized that there were more students than the door gifts and we gave Dettol Hand Sanitizers to the excess students just like what we had expected and planned. However, the 3 talks ended at different timings, hence, the students were released at different timings for the break. This caused the break-time to be dragged to around 35 minutes as compared to the initial 20 minutes. This also resulted in our whole event being delayed although we cancelled the Q&A Session (5 minutes).
The NYP Video Team was also present during the event. They even interviewed our supervisor-Ms Quek on some details of our event.
After
the event, registrars stood by their respective seminar doors for distribution
of door gifts. The runners had to bring the retail students down to the atrium
to attend the WDA Job Fair. Unfortunately, many of the students ran away after the
retail seminar.
At
4:30p.m., once all the students had left the Seminar Lounge, we started the
tear down.
Overall, the Retail Seminar Event was a successful one. We were close to our targeted number of students and the talks went well except that not all students were able to participate in the Lucky draw session in WDA Job Fair.
Our Team Members Opinions:
Bok Gim: It was my first time organizing an event, I found it meaningful as I learned a lot from it especially my project management and communication skills. I improved these skills mainly through the planning stage. We had to apply what we learned in project management module and convey our plannings and decisions to the lecturers, EMRS helpers etc. In addition, i realized my potential in delegating manpower through this stopover. Our event was not perfect there were several errors but I was satisfied with the fact that we were able to reach our objectives more or less.
Bo Tai: To manage this event, I realized that I had gained lots of enriching experience during this event. Apart from our academic studies, I found that we are able to apply the skills to this event. One of it will be project management. I'm also amazed on how our decorations turn out better than the photoshop photo sample for our decoration during planning stage. I'm glad that our event managed to run smoothly without any major problems.
