Her Story
About Cheyenne
Cheyenne Duran serves as Event Program Manager at Apple in San Jose, California. In this role, which she has held for about four to five months, she oversees planning and execution for multiple team forums across regions as well as the managers summit, managing all aspects from registration and catering to transportation, team builders, and dinners while collaborating with production companies, off-site venues, and internal partner teams. With roughly ten years in the events field, she previously worked as an Event Manager at Google for five years. She earned her bachelor's degree in hospitality management and events from San Jose State University in 2017, during which time she served as an orientation leader for three years, participated in SOAR (Student Outreach and Recruitment), and was a member of the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority. Duran attributes her success to receiving post-event feedback and seeing collaborative goals achieved, and she emphasizes the importance of maintaining strong relationships with vendors and partner teams.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Cheyenne
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say just getting feedback after the event. I really like seeing things come to life and hearing the feedback overall of how people were able to really collaborate together and able to kind of pull goals together, and then also just meet people in general and have that connection.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
I would say maybe maintaining relationships in the field. So like just always making sure that you're appreciating all the different vendors, our partner teams, all the people that kind of contribute to the events.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Definitely having resilience is super important, but staying calm in the events industry in general, it's very chaotic sometimes, and I think that just if you can figure out how to stay calm in the chaos, I think that that's definitely key to being in events. And then just kind of going back to resilience, it's like you're gonna be interviewing in a lot of places, you're going to be getting no's and yes's and all of that, but I think it's just super important to power through and always just keep trying for the next thing, and always make sure that you're pushing yourself to a new standard.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I would say just making sure that you stay organized, or just making sure that you're keeping tabs on all the different things that are happening. There's a lot of different programs at once that are taking place within the next few months, so it's just making sure that you're staying on track of project deadlines, and making sure that we're getting approvals in when we need to, and things like that, and making sure that nothing slips through the cracks.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I think maintaining relationships and fostering those is super important in general. And then also I think just being open and curious is super important too. So like we get told no a lot in our field, I think staying curious and just trying to understand is super important when you're trying to navigate those things.
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