As always, regardless of how well organised and prepared you think you may be, there are always little things that stray from the original plan, go horribly wrong, or take longer than expected than the original allocated timeframe.  Thankfully, major disasters were avoided, though the half hour we had to prepare the room before our seminar began passed in the blink of an eye.

Our guests appeared well before we were due to begin, first being Clayton Jacobson, director of Kenny, which starred his brother Shane as a plumber who works for a portable toilet rental company.  It’s rather funny upon reflection that I ran into him in the bathrooms just before we were due to meet in the building’s foyer.  Renowned editor Alicia Gleeson and 2014 Tropfest Winner Julian Lucas completed our guest list.  All our guests were lovely, talkative and despite their successes, still very relatable, which relieved a lot of the stress I had built up over the hours before.

Still, the time I had spent waiting for and speaking with them did make me feel as though I was letting the rest of the team down by not helping them prepare directly.  Like the hours before, our seminar passed even quicker.  All our speakers gave some excellent informative advice, and I was incredibly proud we had managed to attract such distinguished guests.

I was however, really disappointed that we were not allowed more time to set up beforehand, with some of the finer details unable to be tweaked to achieve what could have been a flawless performance from our entire group.  Though I understand that the room and allotted time frame was set in stone before the semester even began, I would strongly recommend that for future year levels, the room is booked for a longer period of time before the seminar, so that we may begin setting up in the room at least an hour before.

That said, I’m still very proud of not only the grade that we achieved, but the quality our seminar displayed.  It was a fantastic group of people to work with, and I gained many new friends and potentially future colleagues along the way.