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One of the main course learning objectives is to educate the student on the opportunities/challenges/and day-to-day realities of working in the meetings and events business. As such, this project assists you in learning specific information about the realities of a career within the meetings/events/trade shows/conventions/special events industry based upon your specific interest areas or needs. You will personally meet a professional within the industry, interview him or her with a standardized set of questions, and then report the findings from the interview along with your personal feedback.

The specific guidelines of the paper project are included below:

• You will need to set up a face-to-face interview with a working professional within the meetings industry. This person may work in any aspect of the industry as long as he or she is in a managerial/supervisory role. This includes working in: meetings, events, special events, conference services, convention & visitors bureau, destination marketing, convention center, arena, tradeshow, convention planning, meeting planning, incentive travel, convention services, destination management company, hotel executive meetings manager, hotel conference manager, or a host of other potential areas within this vast field.

You cannot have an email interview or a telephone interview. You must meet face to face with this individual. You should plan accordingly to meet far enough in advance to allow sufficient preparation time for your written report. Another bit of advice…schedule far enough ahead of time to allow for unseen changes that occur in the working professional’s schedule. Re-scheduling is quite common due to last-minute changes to a person’s activities.

One of the most challenging parts of this project is the identification, location, and connection with a professional qualified to do this interview with you.

• Where should you look for a contact person? Any meetings & events related organization: NACE, HSMAI, MPI, SGMP, ILEA, SITE, or others. The professor can serve as a resource of association names and their likely types of members; however, he cannot be the one to find the person within for your interview.

You may peruse the long list of hospitality organizations found on the FAU hospitality & tourism home page web site. Go to the program information section:  http://business.fau.edu/departments/marketing/hospitality-management/program-information/index.aspx#.WPfnlqK1v4Y

Scroll to the bottom of the page and look for Hospitality & Tourism Professional Organizations.

Some examples of organizations where meeting & events planners or those who work with planners participate include: Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI), Meeting Professionals International (MPI), the Society of Government Meeting Professionals (SGMP), the International Special Events Society (ISES), the National Association of Catering Executives (NACE), et al.

Remember, there are many venues that employ professionals          involved in the activity of meetings & events. Hotels employ          people in their catering and conference services departments,           free-standing convention centers employ sales people to “sell”          the space for events, the convention & visitors bureaus employ        people who solicit meeting planners to hold their events within their specific city or region. There are many, many places to          seek out assistance.

The individual you interview may be an actual meeting & events planner; or, he or she may be on the supplier side (convention industry photographer, wedding cake company president, professional DJ who works with large conferences, etc.).

• Open your paper with an introductory section explaining your interest (or disinterest) in the meetings & events field, how and why you chose this particular person for your interview, and a general discussion of what you thought about meetings & events as a professional before you undertook this paper assignment.

• You must use the standardized list of questions (below) to ask your interviewee. Some of you may wish to record the interview and just take notes along the way. Afterward, you can go back and listen to the interview when you write up your report. This often proves to be a better method than taking notes without recording the session. When recording, you will be better able to be “in the moment” with your guest and focus on the person you’re interviewing. Please make sure you ask the person up front if he or she is comfortable with being recorded. If not, respect them and just take notes by hand.

• You must have thorough responses to each question. Probe if necessary. The more detailed and investigative you are, the better your learning experience with this project and the better the grade you will attain. Short/curt/simplistic answers are not the goal. Exploratory conversations with detailed content and plenty of “substance” is the goal.

• Remember, the main goal of this project is for you to learn from a professional working in the meetings & events industry. You should “walk away” with much fuller knowledge of what the day-to-day work is truly like in this field. Is this a field of interest to you? Is this the particular part of the field you’d like to work in? Could I deal well with the challenges this person confronts working in the meetings industry? And, so on and so forth…

• There is no “minimum length” for these papers (except for the Summary Section – see below). The more detailed the interview, the lengthier will be the responses from the individuals. Grading will include recognition of grammar, punctuation, attention to detail, flow and professionalism in terms of the written language, as well as thoroughness and detail. Make sure you investigate and go “in depth” finding answers to these questions.

• After reporting all the answers from your interviewee, you must then have a separate SUMMARY In this section, please describe the overall experience: what you have personally taken away from the process, how you feel about the possibility of working in (or not working in) the meetings & events industry, etc. Include some tidbits that you learned from this experience that you did not learn from just reading the textbook. Some of you will walk away from this experience feeling that meetings & events is definitely a career choice for you; others will leave thankful they had this opportunity to learn the day-to-day activities and come to the realization that this is not the industry for them.

This summary section should also incorporate some history,          content, etc. related to a graduate-level exploration of the topic. If you have decided to study a hotel’s director of sales, then          maybe a section on hotel sales careers. Or, if you chose a          meeting planner from an association, maybe comparing          association meeting planner roles from other segments. Or,          possibly you chose to interview someone from a convention          center – then maybe a historical look at the convention center          industry.

The separate summary section should be a minimum of 2-4 pages.

• The paper due dates are provided on the syllabus. All papers must be submitted via email and MUST be in a Microsoft Word document format (.doc or .docx). ANY other file types will be discarded and given a grade of 0. Please make SURE you use the correct format. Email papers to [email protected]

YOU MUST ATTACH A COPY OF THE BUSINESS CARD OF

THE INDIVIDUAL YOU INTERVIEW. PLEASE SCAN THE IMAGE OF THE CARD AND INCORPORATE INTO YOUR PAPER’S TITLE PAGE. The professor will reach out to every individual who participates to thank him or her for his or her support of our students. Please remember to ask for a business card. Failure to incorporate a business card will result in a 5-point deduction on your paper grade.

10) Also, all papers must be newly created for the first time. You may not recycle other “similar” paper projects you have done previously during college; this includes portions of any other papers. You may, of course, incorporate quotes or professionally cited information to enhance the overall quality of your summary section. If you incoporate citations or professional quotes from publications, make sure you cite them accordingly using APA style (American Psychological Association). Please visit the FAU library to learn more about APA style if you are not familiar with it.

11) Please remember, this project is for YOU to personally explore and learn from a practicing meetings & events professional.  Make sure you choose a meetings industry segment, job position, and person that is the most likely to help you grow professionally.

As with any activity in this course, feel free to contact me with     any questions you may have. You may reach me at      [email protected]

PAPER DUE DATE:

5:00 pm on THURSDAY, JULY 20^th, 2017     FOR 5 POINTS OF EXTRA CREDIT, THE DUE DATE IS THURSDAY JULY 13^th, 2017

THE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FOLLOW ON THE NEXT PAGES

MEETING & EVENTS INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

• Please tell me how long you have been in the hospitality industry and, specifically, how long you have worked in the overall meetings & events industry. Did you attend college? If so, did you study hospitality management at the college level?

• Please give me some detailed examples of your day-to-day work activities and duties.

• What is the most challenging part of your job?

• What do you enjoy the most about working in the meetings & events field?

• What do you enjoy the least about working in the meetings & events field?

• What does your company do that separates it from the competition in the meetings business?

• If you were just starting out in the hospitality industry, would you re-enter the meetings & events part of the field or would you go into something different? Why or why not?

• If you were a college student, what courses would you take that would make you more effective as an events planner?

• If you could work with any specific client regularly, who would it be and why them?

• Please detail the worst meeting or special event you have had to work? What occurred to make it such a disaster? Have you worked with this same client since that time? Looking back, what were the ways you could have made this meeting or event better?

• Tell me about the organizational structure in your operation. Who do you report to? Who reports to you? How many people overall work in the meetings & events area of the business.

• If you were just graduating from college with an interest area in the meetings & events field, where would you first go for employment opportunities and what type of job would you take so that you could learn the most rapidly?

• Who is your favorite client? Why is he or she your favorite?

• If you could add to your budget in any category – where would you ask the money to go and why would it be placed in that area?

• Which professional organizations should I join as a student and in order to learn about the meetings industry and begin networking for potential career opportunities?

• What is your one line of “advice” that you would like to provide me before I leave this interview – your take away advice for me to part with?

Please remember to thank the interviewee at the time of departure and by following up with a thank you email or phone call. Their time is valuable! Don’t leave without their business card as you must scan a copy to include in the paper.

The best part is that many students enrolled in this course actually find their first jobs out of college through this interview process.

GRADING CRITERIA

Many times, students have unclear guidelines for projects and/or written assignments of this nature. The following grading criteria will illustrate the grade that you can achieve based upon your completed project’s quality:

A/A- Paper

These papers will be 100% free of grammatical errors and/or spelling errors. Remember, 100% free means zero errors.

These papers will have a college-level, extensive type of summary – maybe incorporating some research using APA format of the meetings & events industry.

These papers will be written in clear, distinct format using college-level vocabulary of an excellent quality. These papers will be thorough, have very detailed responses to their interviewees and will almost automatically have questions added to the questions provided above to go into further depth.

A papers will probably be the smallest portion of all papers in this course. A- papers will be the 2^nd smallest portion of papers in this course.

B Paper

These papers will be primarily free of spelling and/or grammatical errors (fewer than 5 spelling and/or grammatical errors). It should be “above average” in comparison to the peers in your course.

B Paper (Continued)

These papers will have an extensive summary from the interview, but need not have extra research or information, yet these should be thorough and well written.

These papers, like A papers, should be written in clear, distinct writing using college-level vocabulary and writing style. These papers will often have one or two additional questions to add depth to the sample interview format above.

C Paper

These papers will have no more than 10 spelling and/or grammatical errors. These papers will also have some difficulty in wording, flow, or style.

These papers will have answers in full format to all of the sample questions and have a summary that meets “minimum” guidelines according to the sample above.

D Paper

These papers will include multiple errors in flow, grammar, spelling, and/or written language expectations for a college graduate student (more than 10 spelling and/or grammatical errors).

The questions will be answered in short, minimal style and the summary will be brief.  These papers should be a minority of all graded.

F Paper

These papers will have missing questions OR greater than ten spelling or grammar errors OR be completely lacking a summary section OR they may have unanswered questions, etc. In other words, they are truly not representative of an upper division course assignment at Florida Atlantic University (FAU).

These papers should be a tiny minority of all graded.

EXTRA CREDIT

The only option for extra credit is to submit your fully completed paper by the earlier due date listed above. You may not, however, early submit your paper for advice or “pre-grading”.