Author Topic: Student SM Challenge #10: Graduation Day  (Read 3236 times)

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PSMKay

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Student SM Challenge #10: Graduation Day
« on: Apr 16, 2010, 01:19 am »
Student SM Challenges present puzzles for our members who are taking classes to become stage managers.  They are open-ended situations with no absolutely correct answers.

As a reminder to our pro SMs out there: The Student Challenges are primarily for students.  While they may be fun to think about, let's leave this to the students and novices for at least the first week! Thanks!

It is graduation day at your college.  You have been assigned, along with your team, to coordinate and manage the graduation day ceremonies.  This is the culmination of a full week of festivities on campus leading up to the big event.  There will be a graduating student body of 3000 undergrads, 1500 grad students, 400 doctorate students and 7 honorary degrees for a handful of celebrities.  There will be a private graduation service in the campus church for the students only, followed by a procession from the church to the campus lawn for a mass gathering of all students and their families.  The lawn event will feature speeches from the college president, an elected student speaker, and an invited guest speaker - the Prime Minister of a country in the Middle East.  Following the speeches, the student body will disperse to their various departments for the actual distribution of degrees, and your portion of the event comes to an end.  (For the record, this was pretty much how my graduation went back in 1998.) 

Planning for this type of event usually starts months, if not a year in advance.  Given that timeframe and the ability to choose your own staff, how do you plan your course of action? How many people would you want on your planning team? How would you delegate the various tasks required?  What sort of things would you need to consider to make sure this major event goes off without any flaws?  What sort of contingencies would you need to have on hand for security, weather, crowd control, transit, cleanup and handling of your celebrity guests?

 

riotous