Starting in Spring 2019, students enrolled in the College of Business and Entrepreneurship can apply to the new Hospitality and Tourism Management program.
Arjun Singh, the founding director of the Hospitality and Tourism Management program at UTRGV, has 25 years of experience as a faculty member in The School of Hospitality Business at Michigan State University.
“I was in one university for 25 years and I felt like, you know, I had contributed whatever I needed to contribute to Michigan State and I wanted to take that knowledge and experience somewhere that is starting a new program,” Singh said.
In an email sent to The Rider, he states that the program mission is to prepare students to manage a hospitality business effectively and sustainably at the highest level of customer service.
“If you get a degree in the hospitality business, you are actually learning about the service business,” Singh said in an interview last Wednesday. “Any type of service business, whether it’s banking or retail or airlines, any company that provides service as a product, is actually a good venue for our students to think about, not specifically only hospitality.”
To enter the program, a student must complete the following requirements:
–be a declared business major
–complete the general education core
–and have 21 credit hours of business classes
Singh said the university expects to have 50 students in the first year of the program and over 100 students by the beginning of 2020.
The courses offered in the 2019 spring semester are
–Host 1301: Introduction to Hospitality and Tourism
–Host 2310: Introduction to Food Preparation and Menu Planning
Courses will be offered on both campuses initially via interactive television (ITV) and will eventually transition to online format, according to Singh.
Once students have completed the basic Hospitality and Tourism Management Foundation courses, they can choose a concentration area.
“This also makes it more interesting for the industry, because they say, ‘Oh, this person is actually specialized in hotels or this person is specialized in restaurants,’ so that gives the students a little bit extra set of classes and makes them more marketable,” Singh said.
Students can select a certificate program from the following: Lodging Management, Food and Beverage Management, Event and Destination Management and Healthcare Hospitality.
Singh said that some of the visions and dreams for the program are a brand-new, state-of-the-art hospitality building, an experiential learning lab and a teaching hotel.
However, these visions are still under discussion and the first step for the program is to recruit an advisory board that will help make the visions come true, he said.
Penny Simpson, director of the Business and Tourism Research Center, said the University of Texas System and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board require new programs to establish the need of the program on a national, state and local level, as well as propose a curriculum and project enrollment.
“There is a very strong need in the Valley for students who are professionally trained in hospitality and tourism,” Simpson said. “It benefits those businesses to have a hospitality management pool here, who are familiar with the culture and the languages in the Valley.”
Singh said the Hospitality and Tourism segment of the industry is huge.
“The hotel industry in the United States has 5 million hotel rooms with about 60,000 hotels,” he said.
Simpson believes the program will grant worldwide opportunities for students who are interested in hospitality.
“Hospitality industry is 11 percent of the gross national product across the world, so it’s among a top industry everywhere and so, this is creating great opportunities for our students,” she said.
