CART Hosts The Central Valley Expo

CLOVIS – Students from the Hospitality and Event Management lab of the Center for Advanced Research and Technology (CART) hosted their first event of the year Thursday evening.

The event, dubbed The Central Valley Expo, focused on bringing non-profit organizations throughout the Central Valley together in order to present them to the public and spread an idea. The idea is that the Central Valley was more than most believed it to be. That it was not just a boring, run-of-the-mill place, but actually a destination site comparable to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.

“The vendors were quite friendly and had said they were happy to have been a part of our event,” said Brandon Mitchell, a student of the Hospitality and Event Management lab.  “I really enjoyed my time.”

On typical school days, the students of the Hospitality class spend their time learning what it takes to host and run an event. Skills taught in the class range from how to keep customers happy and coming back for more, to organizing budgets and income statements to predict sales and costs, all the way to in-depth research of what modern day businesses need to do in order to keep in business.

Students of the Hospitality and Event Management lab of CART are seen here running the silent auction.

On this day, however, the students of CART put all the skills they had spent time learning to use. The event was held in the gallery of CART and ran from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., and hosted an audience of roughly 150 people. Many smiles were seen across and people left feeling satisfied.

Donell Stiers of Clovis said, “This is wonderful! I loved the presentation from 59 Days of Code.”

“It was nice to hear that we have such technology rich people within the valley who know what they are doing,” Stiers continued.

This was the first public event put on by the newly created Hospitality and Event Management lab of CART. A variety of people showed up to show their support and everyone left with a smile. Before the event, the students and teachers were frantic with worry. But the nerves quickly settled when it began and everyone went to do their jobs.

At the end of the night, Bruce Hoffman, a teacher of the Hospitality lab, briefly said “It was nice.”