Ally Weaver and Katie Pepitone are students at the Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality pursuing their B.S in Hotel and Tourism Management. In this post, they tell us more about their internship this spring.
Where are you interning and what is your job title?
We are interning at Premini Events, an event planning agency that specializes in sophisticated and luxurious South Asian weddings. We both have the title of Junior Coordinator.
What projects have you been working on so far?
Right now, we are in the midst of preparing for wedding season! We handle a variety of different tasks, including coordinating with vendors, scheduling client meetings, reaching out to new leads, and creating content for social media. While our day-to-day tasks tend to look very similar, Ally focuses more on marketing while Katie focuses on operations.
Have there been any challenges in your internship so far? If so, how have you learned to overcome them?
Because this internship is our first real experience in the industry, it has been challenging to get acclimated with how exactly everything works. Premini Events has over twenty weddings scheduled for 2021 alone, so it has been difficult, yet rewarding, to learn how to balance each project while ensuring quality stays consistent. We have also had to learn how to operate with the company’s voice in mind, which was certainly an obstacle at first. However, we are very fortunate to have two supervisors who have helped us grow and have been extremely understanding every step of the way.
What do you hope to take away from your internship?
From this internship, we hope to develop many of the skills crucial to succeeding in the events industry. We have already learned so much about how to communicate with clients and vendors effectively, and every day we grow more confident. We have also already developed a great relationship with our supervisors and some of our clients, which we hope to continue even once the internship ends.
What are your future plans?
We both have loved our experience with Premini Events so far, and we are fortunate to have the opportunity to work weddings with the team over the summer as well. While we do not know exactly what the future holds, we have both learned from this internship that Premini is a fantastic company to work with and that wedding planning is the industry we want to stay in.