Mondays..

Mondays typically seem like the longest days of my week and today was especially long. I am still sore from our canoeing escapade yesterday.

We received our individual reports and the professors went over the expectations for our CHESS final group report. During class, we had two guest speakers. The first was a recent Cornell Hotel School graduate who is now the Director of Rooms at the Statler Hotel. He gave us an overview of the hotel management structure. He has acquired a new position at the Andaz hotel in San Diego, which is where he will be working in the near future. As part of our class lecture, we watched a very interesting video about the different jobs in hotels and the various roles and responsibilities of the employees. The setting was the Waldorf Historia in New York City, and the cast was everyone from the bellman to the chef to the concierge. They discussed how every minute is a show, comparing the hospitality industry to a big theatre. Though the movie was made many, many years ago, the concepts it discussed were still relevant to today, for the most part.

In the afternoon, we had the privilege of listening to a Cornell Hotel School admissions officer give a presentation about applying to college, and more specifically, applying to Cornell or the Hotel School. She was very interesting and she gave some wonderful tips about college applications. During her lecture, I learned that if you decide to apply early decision to the Hotel School, you will be competing with the “cream of the crop” as Mark put it. Also, work experience is emphasized in the application process of the Hotel School. It ensures that students know a bit about the industry and they know from personal experience that hospitality is something they want to do.

Later during office hours, my group and I ran individual simulations of CHESS so that we could compare the varied strategies to figure out what worked and what didn’t. Tomorrow, we will be running our final CHESS stimulation as a group and will be working on our report for the rest of the work.