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July 8, 2010

Making Pitt Work:

UPB events staff welcome summer guests

Pitt’s senior administration grabs most of the headlines. The faculty here get noticed when they bring in research dollars, win teaching awards or publish in their fields.

But behind the scenes, University staff, some 7,000 strong across five campuses, often toil in jobs ranging from the mundane to the esoteric. From mailroom workers to data entry specialists, costume designers to biosafety officers, staff at Pitt perform tasks great and small, year-in and year-out, for the greater good of the University.

This is one in an occasional series profiling University staff, providing a glimpse of some of the less recognized employees whose primary business is making Pitt work.

BRADFORD—From fly-fishing workshops and science camps to personal enrichment classes and special group retreats, Pitt’s Bradford campus is jumping during the summer months.

“We have only one day all summer where there isn’t anything going on, and that’s the day we trained our student staff,” said Jessica Visseau, conference services assistant, a May UPB graduate who just started working for the Office of Conference Services.

The eclectic mix of academic, sports-related and special-interest conferences and camps keeps the four-person conference services staff hopping as well.

The UPB staffers accommodate more than 1,000 visitors of all ages and walks of life over the summer months for day-long or longer events, and that’s not counting the influx of incoming freshmen, nontraditional students and transfers who visit campus for orientation sessions.

“We all work as a team to do whatever we need to do, and we all do a little of everything,” said Rhett Kennedy, director of auxiliary services, who heads the office.

Service with a smile: Conference services staff, from left, Rhett Kennedy, director of auxiliary services; Jessica Visseau, conference services assistant; Stacey Ackley, special events coordinator, and Jen Trapp, conference manager.

Service with a smile: Conference services staff, from left, Rhett Kennedy, director of auxiliary services; Jessica Visseau, conference services assistant; Stacey Ackley, special events coordinator, and Jen Trapp, conference manager.

Their duties cover everything from recruiting new clients, drawing up contracts, invoicing and making sure insurance requirements are met, to giving tours, answering phones and setting up housing facilities and conference space according to a group’s needs.

The office also gets some support from student staff who help with housekeeping set-up, he added.

Getting ready for the annual summer invasion starts the previous fall, Kennedy said. “From September to January we pursue new opportunities for the coming summer. In January we start to get a lot of things going to prepare for the summer,” such as the all-important schedule, which is kept on a single big board to avoid double-booking, and providing tailored preparatory information for the various clients, said Kennedy, a 1992 UPB grad, who joined the Bradford staff in 1997 and was named to his current position last year.

Kennedy, who handles the campus’s non-operating budget, said the revenue generated from the summer activities defrays the cost of internal academic and social activities during the school year, such as alumni weekend and graduation exercises.

There is no such thing as a typical day for conference services staff members, said Stacey Ackley, special events coordinator.“Every group is different, requires its own space, has special needs,” she said.

Kennedy added, “The variety of people you meet makes this job interesting.”

In June alone, conference services hosted a science camp for grade schoolers, an emergency management workshop, senior athletic games, a soap box derby, a Rotary concert, the Penn’s Woods Jeep Jamboree, Relay for Life (a fundraising event for the American Cancer Society), two soccer clinics, a swimming clinic, an OSHA safety training workshop, a children’s theatre group and Autreat, a conference for people with autism.

Alex Safran, 7, of Bradford puts together a marble run as part of a lesson about kinetic energy at the summer Science Camp.

Alex Safran, 7, of Bradford puts together a marble run as part of a lesson about kinetic energy at the summer Science Camp.

The Autreat group has stayed at UPB the past three summers. “It’s a conference of people with autism, run by people with autism, designed to teach them how to manage their life to be productive citizens,” Kennedy explained. The group has special considerations that required some training of the UPB staffers by Autreat instructors.

“For example, there is a lot of sound sensitivity, so we don’t do any mowing around the campus while they’re here, and we [disable] the alarm clocks in the residence halls where they stay.”

The campus gets lots of repeat customers, said conference manager Jen Trapp, a sure indication that the clients are happy with the accommodations.

One such repeat client — for 25 years, Trapp estimated — is Limiar USA, a nonprofit organization that advocates for and assists Brazilian children waiting to be adopted.

“We try to personalize our accommodations as much as possible,” Trapp said. “For example, we always put a notice on the mirrors in our residence halls about who to contact for questions or for help. For Limiar, we wrote the information in Portuguese,” courtesy of a student worker familiar with the language, she said.

The staff also will ask dining services to provide a cake for any visitor celebrating a birthday. “We don’t sing, however; we draw the line at that,” Trapp jested.

“One year we actually had a couple from the Jamboree who were on their honeymoon, so we decorated their room.”

Another couple from a past Autreat got married on the Bradford campus during the conference. “There are always new and different things like that happening,” Trapp said.

Another long-time customer is the Penn’s Woods Jeep Jamboree, which just completed its 13th year at UPB, taking advantage of the terrain to learn Jeep driving skills while having fun in off-road settings in the Allegheny Highlands.

“We sometimes have more than one group overlap, and this year we wondered about matching the Jeep Jamboree, which brought 120 Jeeps to campus this year, and the Relay for Life,” Visseau said.

“We have to arrange the space and make sure groups are working well together. Actually, we found that they enjoyed being together,” which was a pleasant surprise, she said.

“The Jeep folks ended up donating money to the Relay — they took up a collection and they raffled off some prizes — and next year they were talking about coordinating with the Relay parade, so the Jeeps can be in it,” Visseau said.

The annual Penn’s Woods Jeep Jamboree brought 120 Jeeps to Pitt-Bradford for three days of off-road travel adventure and training. It’s the 13th year the campus has hosted the summer Jamboree, which draws Jeep owners from across the country and Canada.

The annual Penn’s Woods Jeep Jamboree brought 120 Jeeps to Pitt-Bradford for three days of off-road travel adventure and training. It’s the 13th year the campus has hosted the summer Jamboree, which draws Jeep owners from across the country and Canada.

Kennedy said conference services is thriving despite almost no traditional advertising. Some new clients come as a result of the office’s membership in the Association of Collegiate Conference and Events Directors-International and Unique Venues, two organizations that match groups to conference or club venues.

“But most of our business is by word of mouth. One of our best features is the high-quality dining services we have here on campus. Word about good food travels fast,” Kennedy said. Metz and Associates Dining Services is the campus vendor.

Groups coming to UPB this month include the Embraceable Ewe Knitting Camp; boys’ and girls’ basketball camps; the Seneca Highlands Summer Academy with classes geared to gifted high school students taught by Pitt-Bradford faculty and staff, and Camp Compass for middle schoolers.

Annually in August, among many groups, the campus hosts the Pitt Marching Band and Color Guard for a week that climaxes with a public performance by the band.

And at summer’s end, the planning process starts all over.

For more information, contact UPB’S Office of Conference Services at 814/362-5053.

—Peter Hart


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