In the nearly five years since she graduated from Algonquin College, Event Manager Rebecca Trafford has planned, organized, programmed, and fussed over everything from private events to nationally significant cultural extravaganzas. An alumna of the Event Management program, Trafford has some simple advice for students currently enrolled in the program.
“Volunteer, volunteer, volunteer!” she says.
“Get out there and experience as much as you can. It’s one thing to dream of planning (events), but you need to experience them to really know what worked and what didn’t work. That’s key.”
The Ottawa firm that hired Trafford shortly after her graduation from Algonquin, Chic & Swell Creative Meetings and Events, often solicits volunteers from the College for onsite placements related to specific events. Such practical experience meshes seamlessly with the approach of the College’s program, Trafford says.
“It’s very hands-on,” she says. “The College got us out there on the ground at the events to really experience them and gave us the opportunity to meet the different professionals that one would encounter and work alongside within the industry.”
The program goes way beyond theory, says Trafford. “It really taught you how to be a well rounded Event Manager.”
Nowhere is applied learning more evident that in the annual fundraising events students are required to produce for the Children’s Wish Foundation, Trafford says. Teams of five or six students have to create, market, and run an engaging and successful fundraiser — with no budget.
During her student days, Trafford’s group produced a masquerade benefit gala. “We had over 200 guests and we raised over $10,000 dollars.” That year, her class raised $76,000 overall, she says. Since the program began incorporating these “Wish Events” into the curriculum in 2008, it has raised over a million dollars for the Children’s Wish Foundation.
Giving back to the community in this way was rewarding, says Trafford – but so was the rich experience gained through the student project, supported by instructors. “Everything from (choosing) the theme to picking the venue, to choosing the menu, to selling the tickets, to designing your marketing, to the programming, to the decor, health and safety…. It was fully detailed on how to actually plan an event.”
This past year has been particularly busy for Chic & Swell Creative Meetings and Events. The firm has played a role in a number of Canada 150 and Ottawa 2017 activities, from a New Year’s Eve kick-off event to programs related to the recent 105th Grey Cup Festival. If Trafford wasn’t involved in planning the events, she was assisting in supplying them with their rental needs through Chic & Swell’s sister company, LouLou Lounge Furniture Rental.
“I would say the hardest thing about event management is juggling all the different tasks,” Trafford says. “Some days I go into work with a plan in mind of exactly what I intend on working on that day, and then the emails come through with last minute event requests and the phone rings and you are sent on a completely different path.”
Mind you, says Trafford, the ceaseless variety is also the best thing about the job. “I love Event Management because it’s something different every day. I am certainly not a cookie-cutter desk job type of girl.”
“I credit Algonquin College for setting me on the path towards my achievement,” she says. “With the experience I gained, the networking I was able to do and the list of events I was able to participate in as a volunteer… I truly think it was a full package in preparing me for the real world of events.”
Premier Kathleen Wynne will be in Ottawa this week for a special open-forum event that will be moderated by Cheryl.
Everyone is welcome to attend this Town Hall, which will take place at the Chamber at Ben Franklin Place, 101 Centrepointe Drive — just a stone’s throw from Algonquin’s Ottawa campus. Read more >
Any number of graduates could say they owe their careers to the lessons they learned, but how many are able to pinpoint a single assignment that changed their lives?
Well, prominent Ottawa CTV news anchor Michael O’Byrne for one.
O’Byrne was in the first year of Algonquin College’s print journalism program in 1979 when his instructor announced an overnight assignment: the class was to monitor police radio communication one evening and write as many stories as they could muster from the leads they picked up.
Most of his classmates contemplated writing five or six stories, O’Byrne recalls:
“I said I’m going to get 20 stories. I went out to every little cat call… and I wrote 20 stories the next day.”
One of the stories described firefighters rescuing a cat from a burning building. O’Byrne’s instructor was impressed and suggested he might be able to sell it to one of the city’s two daily newspapers. O’Byrne took it to the Ottawa Journal, whose editors snapped it up.
“They paid me one hundred dollars,” says O’Byrne, but that wasn’t the best part. “They knew who I was, and they hired me a month later. Because of an assignment at Algonquin College. That’s how it started.”
When the Journal folded in the late summer of 1980, happenstance and O’Byrne’s College training again served him well. His program had included one course in television journalism and he had taken to it – quickly learning the different rhythms and conventions of writing for TV and presenting on air. On the strength of that experience, he landed a position with the CJOH (CTV Ottawa) newsroom; nearly 37 years later, O’Byrne looks back proudly on the career he built there.
A long time anchor of CTV News at Noon, O’Byrne has also helped created some award-winning television, including an internationally-acclaimed documentary about Noella Leclair’s experience as Canada’s first recipient of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart.
He has travelled the world on assignment for his station, and recalls covering the launch of the space shuttle Challenger when it carried Ottawa astronaut Steve MacLean into orbit.
“Algonquin College changed my life,” says O’Byrne. “Algonquin College gave me an opportunity that turned into a career.”
As it turned out, the College gave him that career long before he was able to graduate. His work at the Journal and CJOH made attendance at his journalism courses sporadic, and O’Byrne was a couple of courses short of diploma requirements when his classmates graduated in 1982. Years later, the College’s administration offered to give him an honorary diploma, based on his experience and his community involvement (O’Byrne lends his celebrity to more than 200 charity events a year). O’Byrne demurred.
“I said, ‘No, I don’t want an honorary diploma, thank you. I want to go back to school and earn the credits that I was short,’” he recalls. “They arranged for me to go back to school that summer.” He accepted his diploma with that fall’s graduating class.
“It meant the world to me to go back to school and get that diploma and go to my graduation with my kids in the audience,” he says. Today, O’Byrne gives back to his alma matter by serving on the Algonquin College Foundation’s Board of Directors.
Given the dramatic changes O’Byrne has seen in his industry, particularly since the ascendance of the Internet, he has some advice for new graduates of the College’s journalism program: be open and inquisitive.
“Algonquin College gives you the groundwork to convince someone to hire you,” he says. “From there, you’re going to learn so much more.”