Grade: A 100%
I’ve always been interested in pursuing hospitality and tourism as my career. I’m even in my third year of Japanese, because I want to move to Hawai’i and work in the Hospitality and Tourism industry there. I’m also a vlogger and a lot of my vlogs focus on travel. Therefore, it will benefit me to learn more about the tourism industry.
So that’s why I decided to enhance my knowledge of hospitality and tourism to see if my interest in this career option continues.
Before I took my college level Hospitality and Tourism course, I was in the Christa McAuliffe Academy School of Arts and Sciences, and their beginner’s level Hospitality and Tourism class was offered through eDynamic Learning.
Even though eDynamic Learning did offer a higher level class, I decided to take this opportunity to challenge myself beyond a course that is geared for high school students. With my goal of graduating early, I wanted to see if I was ready for a college level class.
So then I discovered the University of Maryland: Introduction to Hospitality and Tourism Industry course offered through EdX. I thought it would give me a better idea of whether or not I am ready for a college and whether that might be a good major for me.
As expected, University of Maryland: Introduction to Hospitality and Tourism Industry is more in-depth than the prior class I took in my freshman year. In this course, I learned about commonly used hotel jargon like “All Hands on Deck” and “Rack Rate;” which tourism career one should choose; the details of travel and transportation; standards of the Food and Beverage Industry; different aspects of lodging that I didn’t know existed; and so much more.
I thought that the fact that in 2018, U.S. travelers spent about $1.1 trillion on travel, according to the U.S. Travel Association particularly interesting, and it validates my belief that this is a healthy industry that would be a good career for me.
I look forward to my next vacation where I can impress the hotel staff with my jargon use and my knowledge of things like the “Green Hotel” movement (which is why today most hotels have signs in the bathrooms encouraging travelers to reuse towels, and why more hotels are using less plastic, which I love as a budding environmentalist).
Throughout the course there are brief quizzes. However, a drawback of eDX is that if one doesn’t pay, one doesn’t actually get grades or a certificate upon completion. That said, I did get the knowledge, and that’s what I was after. Another major drawback is that there were a lot of confusing typos, which was ironic for a college-level course.
For field trips? Well, who can top a nice cruise to Bermuda and a trip to Disney World’s new Galaxy’s Edge this year?
Based on my quiz grades for which I was 100% correct on each one, I was given a grade of A. I walked away from this course feeling confident that my hospitality and tourism knowledge was enhanced. This is not the end of my learning; I will continue to seek out more education about this industry in the future.
Nix The Norm 