Hospitality – Event Management Students Shine at OCMC

By: Nicole Churchmach

Imagine being in your third semester of a 2-year program and one of your professors asks you to REIMAGINE a face-to-face event with a 40-year history into a fully online event with 11 competing Colleges and 11 different events.

Like many face-to-face events, the Ontario Colleges Marketing Competition faced a pause due to COVID-19. The pause occurred as Humber College (Longo Faculty of Business) was preparing to host the next face-to-face competition. With a hotel and conference centre book, reality set in, and OCMC had to be REIMAGINED into a fully online event. Where do you begin to plan an event that has always been face-to-face, doesn’t have a protocol book on what works and what doesn’t work online, and to create an experience where students are engaged and ignited with school spirit from start to finish. Insert our AMAZING Hospitality-Event Management students as the event planners of the very first ever virtual OCMC event-OCMC Reimagined.

Twelve of our Hospitality-Event Management students (Frieda, Sherry, Jacqueline, Palakpreet, Khadejah, Aliah, Taryn, Bibiana, Krystyna, Haidaly, Simitha, and Jade) formed a special OCMC Event execution class that allowed them to jump right into event planning, taking on marketing and sponsorship, Pheedloop (logistics), judging, volunteers, cases, and Quiz Bowl, while sharing the event chair position on a weekly basis, working closely with members of the Faculty Planning committee in all aspects of development. This was event planning at its finest. Without this group of students, how worked tirelessly to create a positive event experience for our guests, OCMC would not be possible.

Melanie Haskins from Algonquin College summarizes the work of these students perfectly, “I am still recovering from an exciting few days and can’t imagine how you are feeling! What a great event. Congratulations to you and your entire team (because there must have been a small city behind this). I can’t even fathom the logistics, hours of prep, hundreds of hands, and heads that went into making this work. Your team was on top of every aspect and I was so impressed with even the small details like your help email. I had to use it a few times and the response was swift as well as above and beyond helpful! A true sign of a good event in my eyes as the pomp and circumstances are easy to plan for, the small unexpected details are much harder to stick handle in the moment and your team did it expertly.”

Congratulations to our third-semester Hospitality-Event students. You should all be as proud as we are of you all.

OCMC Reimagined 2021 Humber Event Planning Team