Interview with Hunter Gresham
University Unions & Student Activities, Virginia Tech
by: Rebecca Gallup

           Internships and international travel provide invaluable experience that can be used in the professional world. Hunter Gresham has used both of those tools to propel her to assistant director for Event Planning in just 4 ½ years of working for Virginia Tech.

           A graduate of University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Gresham has traveled the world and held jobs in non-profit organizations as well as in large corporations. Her first job was for Universal Companies, the largest supplier to day spas and salons in the world. Her job there was marketing director where she got to use her public relations skills. Gresham since then found her niche in event planning and has been working in the field ever since.

           Gresham’s current job is assistant director for Event Planning at Virginia Tech. She is responsible for campus public space reservations, event coordination and even the staff in the event planning office. The discourse below is part of an interview in which Gresham discussed getting to her current position.

Q: I see that you graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. How does the atmosphere of that school compare to Virginia Tech?

A: The reason I went to UT Knoxville is because I grew up in a town similar to Blacksburg, but without the university. I live here now and I love it. That’s one of the benefits in that you’ve got the small town but with all the vibrancy and interaction because of the university, in my opinion. You’ve got cultural events that come through as well as theatrical events and speaker series. There is always something going on. There’s an energy that is still the small town feel where you could walk down the street and see someone you know or pass someone at the post office or grocery store that you know. It doesn’t feel too big.

Knoxville was different and the reason I went there is because it’s a big city compared to where I grew up. It is more of a metro area, not a rural area. I’m sure people who live in Knoxville think it’s a small city compared to Boston and Charlotte and New York City, but that was what I loved about it.  The University of Tennessee was the university all closely laid out. It was kind of a suburb or neighborhood of this much larger city. You could go to West Town or the downtown or to the outskirts and never see anyone that you knew or cross paths with someone you might have classes with. It’s more of a big city feel versus a small town feel.

Q: How did you end up working at Virginia Tech?

A: My whole family are Hokies and I married into a family that are all Hokies. So long story short, my husband was my older brother’s college roommate here at Tech. We met when I was a senior in college, were friends for several years, and then basically started to date. It boiled down to that was the person I was going to marry and he was here and had a better job than I did because, at the time, I was living in Kingsport, Tenn., we decided that I would be the one to move. So I was coming regardless and feel like I very much lucked in to the fact that there was not only one, but two event planner positions for this office at the time that I was looking to move.  That’s really how it worked out. It was where my husband was and I lucked into this job and 4 ½  years later have been able to be promoted and work my way into assistant director. So it worked out very well for me.

Q: What made you become interested in event planning?

A: I was pretty lucky to know going in to college what I wanted to do in terms of the public relations being the area I wanted to get into. One of the things about Tennessee was that their College of Communication was very strong. I was able to get into the College of Communication and declare it upon entering college and then find my niche. So I took some journalism classes, broadcasting classes and finally settled on public relations being what I wanted to be doing. And I've always kind of equated that to a business degree. It is very broad so you have to find your niche and I sort of found mine because I was always interested in it, I didn’t think that someone could make a living being an event planner.

I graduated and traveled for a year before my first job. My first job was as a marketing coordinator that marginally included activities in event planning like scheduling and coordinating photo shoots or trade shows. So that exposed me, and then an opening for  a festival in my hometown that I have been affiliated with my entire life as an attendee and loving it became available and I interviewed for that and that actually threw me into the actual profession.

Q: Did your time with Up With People and international travel have any impact on the way you interact with other people or how you do your job?

A: Absolutely 100 percent. I learned more in that one year than I learned I think in all my college combined and any other period in my life.  It pushed me to learn. Some people went into it hoping they would come out that way and others resisted it, but inevitably you were traveling with 150 people from 32 different countries and over the course of that year I visited 14 countries and lived with 65 different host families. So its not a tourist experience. You aren’t always having an English speaker on the other side of the table. It kind of throws out the window the whole idea of ‘don’t talk to strangers.’ We would literally pull into a city, get off the bus, they hand you a piece of paper and you meet your host family for the next three days. You get into their car and go home with them. You sleep in their bed and eat their food, or whatever the case may be, and never thought twice about it. Some situations were very challenging whether it was a socioeconomic issue with higher status or dirty homes who didn’t have the same level of cleanliness that I had been raised with. Your language barrier and social belief differences were a big part.

I traveled with homosexual and heterosexual students who were Indian, Asian and all different backgrounds. We could be in America and I would be the American and I was the normal one and the others didn’t know how to interact. Our Asian students didn’t speak English well, so in an American household the families would respond more to me and they would almost yell or elevate their voice because they think the other travelers don’t understand. Volume doesn’t help you understand anymore, but it’s a natural reaction.

 I traveled during an election year and Clinton was in office. And everyone, Canada in particular, had very strong opinions about President Clinton and did not care to air them. So depending on how you felt about the situation, it was very challenging.

You go to church with your host family. Sometimes they were Baptist and sometime they were Catholic and sometimes you were with an Atheist family who didn’t believe anything at all. I think it makes you aware to the fact that there are all kinds of people. But what it taught me in then end that there is common ground among all these people and that you just have to find it.

Q:  As the marketing director for Universal Companies, the largest supplier to day spas and salons, you had a large responsibility for a huge company. Did your schooling and experience prepare you for that job?

A: It was my first real job out of college. The company is much bigger now than they were when I was with them. But they were the largest supplier to day spas and salons in the world. In terms of scope they were very big, but in terms of employees and size at the time they weren’t anywhere near the size of a major corporation. In terms of preparation, I think in particular my writing skills and editing and my ability to write creatively helped me tremendously to copy for the magazine and things like that.  Other skills I think I acquired through internships that were required of me other than the actual school work that was performed. I had to, in order to graduate, do two internships. One was with an advertising agency in downtown Knoxville. That was great because it gave me my first taste of an office environment and kind of how things work. It was very creative and I got to test my writing skills. And then my second internship was with the March of Dimes. It was completely different in that it was non-profit, low or limited resources, but at the same time I was doing Walk America which was a big event. So the internships I think were what helped me more than anything.