Believe it or not, I did in fact come to Australia to study. I am a part of the Tourism and Event Management program with TEAN Abroad, and because of that, have gone to class almost every day and had various field trips that relate to the class.
For the actual class session, we spend three hours a day either learning about the inner workings of tourism or how to plan a large scale event. In addition to these two projects, we also have a final comprised of two essays about the things that we learned during the tourism portion of the class.
The first project consisted of creating an event to promote Kakadu National Park, which is in the Northern Territory of Australia. In order to complete this project, we visited Kakadu and learned more about the culture and history of the site and the people who live there. Many different Aboriginal tribes still live in Kakadu, which allowed us to learn more about Aboriginal culture than if we were just taken to a museum. All of the information that we learned about the actual site, as well as the culture within the site, we used in order to create an event for Australians to come to the national park.
In order to create an event, we had to do research on the type of people who live in the Northern Territory, as well as come up with a concept that would interest this target market. Then we had to come up with the location, as well as the lay out of the actual event. Lastly, we overlooked all of our activities and created a risk management chart in order to make sure that we had all of our bases covered if this event did actually was happening. Once these sections were all in order, we presented it to the class as if we were pitching them our idea for an event.
For our second project, we had to research the sustainability of tourism within The Rocks, an area in Sydney right next to the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. During this research project, we learned a great deal about The Rocks in general as well as the tourism of the area. In order to learn more about the location, we went to The Rocks Discovery Museum, The Rocks Information Centre and The Rocks Ghost Tours. All of these places told us about the break down of tourists who come to this area, and the things that these tourists would like to see and do. We also spoke to some tourists to gain knowledge about why they came to The Rocks, and to Sydney in general. This project really opened up our eyes to the vast number of people who come to Sydney and the various elements they look for while roaming the city.
Overall, the various projects and class sessions that we took in the Tourism program taught us much more than we expected. Although we knew we would have a better understanding of how tourism in Australia operates, we gained knowledge about the local people as well as the other tourists visiting the area. Since we traveled to so many parts of Australia, having a background in tourism made it easier to see the scams as well as how some cities are better at marketing themselves than others. Now wherever I go, I will be checking to see how they are portraying their city and if they are doing a good job, and that is something I would not be able to do if I had not taken the Tourism class.
Molly Greathouse is a student at the University of California, Irvine and a TEAN Featured Blogger. Molly studied abroad on the Australia Summer Program with TEAN.
