Mary Beth Jennings - conference manager, O'Reilly Hall, UCD
I’VE BEEN here for four-and-a-half years. Prior to this I did the same job at the Merrion Hotel, but this is less pressurised.
You get far fewer short notice events in academia. In fact, for some of the big international conferences we might have a four-year lead time.
I start work at 7.30am and there are four of us on the team here.
We spent the summer looking after language students. At one stage there were 2,000 of them on campus, so we’re the ones responsible for all those noisy buses!
We love to see them though, because they liven up the place when the students are off.
My first job every morning is to do a fire check, to make sure everything is okay from the night before.
Then I’ll check e-mails. Most will be queries for events that are just about to start. Academics organise their conferences after they’ve done their day’s work, so there’ll be lots of e-mails that have come in late into the night.
We had 187 event days last year. At our peak around 2007, we were running at a rate of 260 event days a year, so it’s a little quieter now.
Sometimes we get strange requests. We had a veterinary conference organiser who wanted us to provide horse sperm for an event, so we had to find a microbiologist on the campus to sort that for us.
Typically though, academic conferences are easier to manage than commercial ones, mainly because the people attending are just so keen to learn.
It’s not a jolly. You’ll have 800 of them in a room and could hear a pin drop because they’re all concentrating so hard.
I’ll have lunch in the canteen with the students and academics. On summer days, all you can see outside the windows here at the hall are students sunbathing, so it’s a much more chilled place to work than in a hotel in the city centre.
Many of the conference organisers will have hired an events management company, so in those cases we act more as facilitators.
For smaller ones, we do the event management for them. If it’s their first conference, or a very important one, the organiser will want a lot of hand-holding.
At the moment I’m helping prepare bids and presentations for conferences for 2016.
Every day is different though. This week it’s conferrings, three a day, 1,000 people at a time and then out into the marquee. It’s hectic.
Most days I’ll finish by about 4.30pm, but on occasion it could be 6am.
We might have an awards dinner that finishes late, and then we have to stay all night to strip the place in readiness for a conference the next day.
It’s exhausting, but at least we get plenty of notice.
In conversation with SANDRA O'CONNELL