Running the Higher Education Panel was a Learning Experience

Running the Higher Education Panel was a Learning Experience

As I write, I’m sitting in the back of Mundelein Auditorium waiting for an event to finish. They’re just doing panel discussions, so I don’t need to be too proactive.

But that wasn’t the case last night and this morning.

For a while I’ve been passed around as a go-to contact for events in Mundelein Auditorium (Loyola’s home for the arts). On my website (www.EvanFazio.com) I spoke about supporting a speech by Robert F. Kennedy JR.

A little while later I was contacted by Suzan Cibulskis, one of the nicest executive assistants I’ve ever met. I went to her office and we planned her event. But on the night of the setup I ran into problems. The projector and screen that I had rented for free from the Digital Media Lab at Loyola weren’t big enough. Even further, the VGA cable wasn’t long enough to connect the laptop on the podium to the projector.

I went into problem solving mode. I first called the Digital Media Lab, but they didn’t have anything longer. Then I called my department, and they didn’t have anything either. I looked around the auditorium but to no avail. I know I had seen a long one once, and now it had disappeared. So I decided to look in our supply closet.

Only one problem; my key got me into the main office, but not into the supply closet. I called Campus Safety for an admit (basically to let me in) but they didn’t have an access list for that space and weren’t able to help me out.

So I settled for putting the projector on the stage, which made the screen a little smaller (it was small enough already) because of the short distance between projector and screen, and the projector got in the way of the screen itself.

The morning of the event it was deemed that the screen was not large enough, and especially so with the projector on stage. Luckily, Rob Kelly (Vice President of Student Development) knew to call the Office of First Year Experience and they managed to bring over a larger screen. We started the event only 10 minutes late, and by the time the first video was over we were back on schedule.

So I learned a lot about how many different departments work together. I could see what the Digital Media Lab had to offer, how things sometimes disappear from common spaces like the auditorium, how Campus Safety selects their admits, and, most importantly:

When the Vice President calls a department, they come running.

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