Samuel Phillips, Events Technical Manager, Catering Services

Celebrating our community during COVID-19

We have had to create new ways of replacing physical events with virtual ones. One example was to assist the Enterprise team with a highprofile pitch event that could no longer take place in person. 

After finishing my Materials degree at the Royal School of Mines I (almost literally) fell into a role working for the Campus Services Events Department over the summer of 2006. The rest, as they say, is history. As the Events Technical Manager, I offer audio visual support to any College event and oversee a team of casual technicians that keep College events running. We are the sole producer of live streaming video content to Imperial’s YouTube channel, with over 130,000 subscribers worldwide. 

As a department rooted in the physical, but having a role that projected into the virtual, I have been helping my colleagues, clients and staff move from one world to another. I created a Microsoft Teams presence for the department so we could all keep in touch, and offered my help to the wider catering department to assist with remote working and try to take some workload off ICT.  

We have also had to create new ways of replacing physical events with virtual ones. One example was to assist the Enterprise team with a highprofile pitch event that could no longer take place in person. We looked at multiple options and decided to put together a pre-recorded video that would ‘premiere’ on YouTube and then lead them on to an interactive area to talk to the pitching companies. It turned out to be a great success in a tight timeframe.  

COVID-19 has completely changed everyone’s day job. For events, this is even more pronounced. With my colleagues going on furlough in two waves (you cannot deliver events catering virtually), I am spending more of my time talking to the College departments responsible for Inaugurals, Festival, and Graduation than I am within my own department. 

Discover more from Imperial people

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading