Hannah Petersdorf

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of my internship can sometimes vary from week to week. Most of the time I go into the club a couple of days a week and start setting up for the wedding on the weekend. I also take most of the pictures that will end up on some type of social media account. The accounts we are redoing are Instagram, Facebook, The Knot, Wedding Wire, and Yelp. During a wedding, I work with the servers and serve food and float around to see if anyone needs anything and after dinner, I clean almost all of our glassware and help take all the linens off the tables.

Accomplishments

My greatest accomplishment during my internship was that I got to run a rehearsal dinner by myself. My boss was out of town and she trusted me to go through the ceremony with the bridal party twice. Then they had dinner at the country club buffet style. Everything ran smoothly with no problems and the officiant was extremely helpful. This was my first event by myself and I'm very pleased with how it turned out!

Learning experience

One of the greatest lessons I've learned is to not take everything personally. People are going to get mad and yell at you over things you can't control. Sometimes you can fix the issue and sometimes you can't. I've learned to take these experiences and learn from them, they might be good or they might be bad but you can always learn something from them. Another big lesson I've learned in this industry is that teamwork is key. Being able to work well with other departments or coworkers helps make everything run smoothly. It also helps take all the stress off of one person.

What advice would you give?

Some advice I have for future students in my major would be to get as many internships/experiences in this industry as you can. I've been learning hands-on and it's very different than in a classroom. It also helps narrow down what area of events you may or may not want to go into. It also helps show what events are in real life and what the day of an event planner looks like.