CEC Event Planning
CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT OF CONFLICT
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In my first semester, I realized that I had not been as engaged with the school activities as much as I wanted. There were many events that I had not been keeping up with and a lot of times had to rely on my peers to inform me about them. To drive myself to become more active in the field, I decided to become part of the organizing team and joined the CEC event planning ExEd in my second semester.
Never been involved in the logistics aspect of UWC, I had almost no idea about how the school operated: what needed to be done to get the events going, who needed to be contact, or even worse, what were the important events I should be expecting in the second semester. Therefore, when I joined the ExEd, I was overwhelmed by the amount of information provided, especially when we immediately started working on planning the 2019 Annual Conference which was coming up soon.
I first began by working on smaller tasks such as writing biographies for speakers who would be invited to the conference and formatting documents. The latter was something I realized I could do well and hence took on the responsibility to format the documents before they were sent out. After working with the group, I gained a better understanding on the event and became more acquainted to the process, prompting me to expand onto other tasks as well. One was assigning the speakers to different locations on campus according to their talk. While the task seemed easy at first, I realized at the end that it in fact required a deep understanding on all the speakers and their conference topics to match them with an audience group. A lot of the tasks were the same as this: seeming easy at first, though I ended up learning a lot of new skills when I actually got to work on them.
On the day of Annual Conference, I was given the task to welcome the speakers and students from other schools and escort them around. In doing so, I had the opportunity to connect with people outside of our school, with some students coming all the way from Mexico. I had a lot of fun throughout the event and was satisfied to see that the event was successfully accomplished.
I did not continue with the ExEd in my second year due to time conflict with my leadership ExEd, though I was asked to help the ExEd in a lot of ways. For instance, I helped format the ExEd poster for the ExEd Fair in the beginning of the year, format the sign up sheets, and design the logo for the 2020 Annual Conference. The CEC event planning ExEd had exceeded my expectations and introduced me to a new activity I found to be a lot of fun. Despite not being able to continue with the ExEd, I still found opportunities to become part of the organizing team for many other school events, such as TEDx and Yule Ball.
Annual Conference logo I designed