Asia In Context Part 2

The next major hurdle for the internship was catering. During the conference we decided to provide both breakfast and lunch. For lunch we wanted to be sure to have a wide variety of selection so that we could cater to everyone’s dietary needs. Through various emails and phone calls with both Glenmore and Chartwells. It was decided that we would use Glenmore. We created a unique Mediterranean menu that included both vegetarian and non-vegetarian options.

We decided to invite a handful of secondary school teachers. As a pull for them to attend they were offered the latest copies of one of the speakers books. Beyond that I created a master list of UMBC History and Asian Studies professors and the various published books they have written. We decided to have these books on display during the conference in hopes of promoting them. I had to do some searching online to find hard copies that were not too expensive for all the books. Once that was done we quickly ordered the books in hopes that they would arrive before the conference (they did!).

The majority of the internship has been emailing. As the RSVP’s for the conference started to come in I created a spreadsheet in order to keep track of who was planning to attend and their contact information. Since the RSVP’s were emailed to me, it was easy to keep everything organized and online. This came in handy when it became time to send the papers out. Two of the emails bounced back but we were able to back through the initial RSVP sheets and work out where the typo was. The papers were sent two weeks before the conference, in hopes that everyone would have time to read through them before the conference.