Lesson Learned

For about a month and a half now I have been trying to plan an event for my residential community called "Tatted". The purpose of this program is to teach residents all they should know before getting at tattoo. There is an increasing number of students getting tattoos and I wanted to make sure the ASU students were well informed about the procedure and long term effects of getting a tattoo.

The idea for the program came from a Resident Assistant website. I wanted to bring in a certified tattoo artist for a Q&A session with residents and then follow the Q&A by offering the services of an airbrush tattoo artist so that the students could try on a tattoo with out having to commit to a permanent one.

Unfortunately, I was not able to organize this program before the end of this semester. I made every effort I could to get both a tattoo artist and air brush artist on the same day, but there were too many obstacles to overcome that I could not complete everything I needed in the time frame I gave myself.

Although the event did not happen this semester, there are many things I learned from the experience. Here are some things I learned that you should think about while creating programs in order to avoid what I went through:

• Use an air brush artist that is already on your University's "approved vendor list"
• If you have to use someone not on the "approved vendor list", make sure that you give yourself one to two months to get all necessary paperwork signed.  (At my school, it takes two weeks for a contract to be signed)
• Don't announce your scheduled date until you have secured all event performers
• If you are asking someone from the community to speak at your event, ask them in person to come to your event and then keep checking in until the program
• Ask your Community Director if your University will need an insurance certificate from the vendor and if there are "umbrella terms" that should be included on the certificate
• Ask the vendor if it will be possible to add the necessary umbrella terms to their certificate and if there will be an extra charge for adding the terms
• Ask for help from other CA's on your staff. Big projects like the one I tried to do needs at least two people working on it to be successful

 Now that I know all of these things, I can better prepare for all the things I will have to do to make this program happen next semester. Trying to plan this event was stressful, but it was a great learning experience and I always enjoy having new learning experiences that help me grow and become more professional.






If you are interested, here is the flyer I created for the event: