Hotelie-On-the-Go

Well, Evan got initiated a couple weeks ago:  that’s right, I am now officially a member of The Delta Phi fraternity (Llenroc as all the current Cornellians call it), and life has never been better.  The air seems fresher, food tastes yummier, and my stress-level has finally returned to managable state.

I wrote another post about pledging a while ago, and I’m looking forward to going back to these posts to see how my views change between then and now.  Even though pledging is a little difficult … or somewhat difficult … meh we’ll say extremely difficult … I would recommend it to anyone.  You don’t even know the type of resourcefulness you will achieve when you have absolutely no time.  After pledging ended, I actually do stuff in my free time — the other day, I had a couple hours in between classes where I got all of my financial aid crap done! Wtf … Before that would time would’ve been spent snoozing or FaceBook stalking, but I’m still in the survival–never enough time for anything–need to take a shower–somewhat sleep-deprived mindset.

Anyway, none of my other achievements are quite the same as this.  Feels different, comforting, and glorious all at the same time.  Oh yes, I’ve been a pledge, and now I’m a NIB (Newly Initiated Brother) — I’m gonna stick with NIB.

BTW, Check out this hilarious video that chronicles the truth behind being a “Bro.”  (Thanks to Steve Matthews for e-mailing this) –> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaS6mlUS5Kw

Last week, I was saddened to see that Binghamton, NY — just about a 10-minute drive from my hometown in Vestal — was the topic of national news broadcasts across the country for a hostage shooting where 13 people were killed.  On Friday, I was casually scouring through some messages in my GMail account when one of the CNN news updates that I get forwarded all the time to my inbox read as the following:

– Four dead, more than a dozen wounded in Binghamton, New York, shootings, law enforcement official tells CNN.

Needless to say it was a little bit shocking have this pop into my e-mail inbox.  Little did I know that the situation would get worse and that my hometown would be the subject of more headlines (Watch this video of the after-report from the Binghamton American Civic Association where it all happened — a place I’ve driven by many times):  Binghamton struggles to understand why gunman killed 13 (CNN)

My condolences go out to all of the families of the people that lost their lives last Friday.

I had my what I think was my last interview of the semester a couple days with Aramark for a summer internship position.  From what I’ve heard about Aramark internships, the pay not be the best around (even though it’s not that bad), but you get to travel to different sites where management services are offered–i.e. stadiums, offices, convention centers, etc.–in places like Erie PA, Boston MA, or NYC to name a few.

If that falls through, I will probably be gracing the hills of Ithaca over the summer unless something else presents itself.  Training has started for me at WVBR 93.5 FM–the student radio station on campus–with the sports department, so I basically get to talk about sports and call it an extracurricular activity.  Not a bad deal at all.

Over the summer, I guess I would split time between WVBR and summer RA’ing to get some money and maybe a little professional experience, since I’m in the process now of getting my concentration off the ground in the Hotel School (nothing official yet; I still have to sign the papers with the advisor in either the Marketing, Information Science, or Law department depending on which one I choose, but it’s just a matter of me handing the papers in at this point — Hotel School Concentrations)

Anyways, the economy imploding might have a silver lining after all.  Staying in Ithaca would definitely be a chill summer where I wouldn’t have to think that much, so it would give me an excuse to somewhat relax for a couple months.

Well, spring break is finally here.  Definitely didn’t come quick enough between weekly 5-hour statistics assignments, mind-numbing finance problem sets, and a ginormous marketing group project (oh … and pledging!), so I’m glad to get away for a week and catch some zzzzzz’s back at my home base in Vestal, NY.

Over spring break, I still got some stuff I gotta take care of — homework, pledging stuff, etc. etc. — but I’m more looking forward to a little road trip that I will be taking in the middle of this coming week; on Wednesday, I’ll be going to visit the Culinary Institute of America (or, what I always tell people, “I’m going to visit the CIA” cuz it sounds cooler) to see if I wanna pursue this collaborative degree program.

Take a quick look at the CIA campus:  Culinary Institute of America Pictures
In the Hotel School, students have the chance to apply for this collaborative program with the CIA where you can get an A.O.S. in Culinary Arts from the CIA while you get your Hotelie bachelor’s degree — all in four years.  As rigorous as it is, I think that if I finally visit this place, I might be able to focus my interests a little bit more depending on whether or not I like it up there at the CIA in Hyde Park, NY.  If I do, I might lean towards the restaurant thing — if not, the marketing/media interests I have might be better.  Who knows.
So, that Wednesday will be my only active day though.  The rest of Spring Break — I will be either a lump on the couch, a lump in my bed, or going to the gym.  No thinking allowed (or hopefully a very small amount =D).

This semester — even though it’s a little bit more rare for a sophomore — I decided to start pledging a fraternity on campus.  Delta Phi (commonly called Llenroc around Cornell) is a great organization with some really great guys.  The one thing that amazed me about the frat was how involved all of the brothers seem to be in different parts of the Cornell campus:  Student Assembly, Cornell Daily Sun, theatre performance, sports, business clubs, etc. etc.  With a pledge class of 22 guys, it should be a lotta fun as I (hopefully) hit the home-stretch of pledging in a few weeks.

On that note, I’ve definitely learned a couple things about what to do and what not to do with pledging; soooooooo, for all the people that are thinking about pledging, here are some tidbits of advice:

• Be okay with not knowing where your life is going:  This was probably one of the most difficult aspects of it for me; a lot of times, things come up at the last minute, schedules change, responsibilities shift, etc.  You need to be fine with (or at least learn how to become fine with) not having every part of every day planned out.

• Front-load your work:  Kind of an offshoot of the first one, but you need to get your work done whenever you have time.  Like I said, your schedule might (and often will) change without you foreseeing it, so make sure you leave time to get your life sorted out academically first.

• Don’t take yourself too seriously:  Pledging is supposed to be fun believe it or not, despite all the nasty stigmas that it holds.  Pledging is stressful — definitely stressful — but it’ll go much smoother if you learn to laugh about things.  Treat pledging as almost like a 4-credit class that you should carve out time for, and hopefully, that will help you enjoy the process more.

• Don’t put on a show:  As cliche as it may sound, pledging almost forces you to be yourself.  You spend a lot of time with the members of the fraternity and your pledge class, so you might as well just be yourself and make friends that way.  If you made the right choice as far as what frat to pledge, you’ll mesh with the crowd just fine.

I don’t need to tell anyone — at least those of us looking for summer opportunities and permanent employment out of Cornell — that the economy is really screwing over college kids right now.  With businesses collapsing everyday, companies merging week after week, and college seniors hearing that their once promised positions after graduation have now been “eliminated in light of the current economic conditions,” students seem to be looking into the big, black abyss of no-opportunity that will be the year of 2009.

During Career Day (the massive Hotel School career fair that happens every October) and those days coming right before and after it this past year, I had 7 interviews.  Second interviews:  none.  Internship offers:  none.  Basically, there’s really just nothing out there.  I feel really bad for the seniors who are trying to find work now, because the number of jobs available shrinks with each passing day.  As I get turned down for interview after interview, it really is humbling to see how terrible of a time it currently is, economically-speaking.
Nevertheless, I think this can still be a productive summer — hopefully, I can even further my interests without a summer internship.  Plan B for me is to apply as a Summer RCA (where I will be a Resident Advisor for high school students who are participating in Cornell Summer College Programs) and split time with WVBR 93.5FM here in Ithaca.  I still have a ton of interest in marketing, media, etc. (with sports in particular), so any experience I could get at WVBR would almost be like a mini-internship in a way.

Summer job or not, I’m looking forward to the summer already.  Planning for when classes end can never come too early =D.

I had the chance to go to Canyon Ranch on a field trip about 2 weeks ago for the graduate course I was taking — HADM 6602:  Spa and Spa Hotel and Resort Development and Management (probably the only course I will ever have the chance to start taking that has 3 “and’s” in the title alone).  There are 2 required field trips for this course where the class basically packs into a bus and drives off to see some of what we’re talking about in class.

So Canyon Ranch is basically the ultimate health resort:  it has gyms, spas, nutritionists, doctors, hotel rooms, and $1,000 per night pricetag to boot (!!!!!).  Their home-bases are in Tucson, AZ and Lenox, MA — obviously, we visited the one in Lenox, which is built in the Bellefontaine Mansion (apparently a renovated estate that once belonged to aristocrats).  This place has been dubbed as the spot where the “wealthy get healthy.”

Touting that Canyon Ranch gives their guests “the power of possibility,” every brochure and pamphlet I received had some smiling couple eating some weird vegetables, spandex-clad women jazzercising, middle-aged friends chasing after butterflies on the hiking trail, etc. etc. (I might be exaggerating a bit, but you get my point).

Look at some of these pictures:  you’ll get what I’m talking about (http://www.canyonranch.com/resorts/lenox-photos.aspx?bhcp=1).
I love to keep healthy — working out is probably my only hobby at this point (even though that gets sidetracked by a Cornell party every once in a while ), and it’s something that has become a part of my daily routine.  Going through the whole day in Lenox though, I felt like I was being sold the idea of “health.”  In some respects, I almost felt like I was in a health cult — all of these overly-happy, peppy individuals talking about giving their guests a “life-changing” experience … for $1,000 per night.

Yup, I’m sure that those people get into that for the fulfillment.  I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity for me to see a possible career avenue; I like health — I like hospitality — why not combine them?  I just never thought that it would bother me as much to have the idea of being healthy so commercialized and accessible only to the people that had money literally falling out of their pockets.  I don’t think the “power of possibility” is being very widespread if $1,000 per night is what you’re charging to give people an “enlightening experience.”

In short, the whole thing came off as B.S. to me.  And I was very surprised, but to be honest, I was a little bit happy as well.  As I go further and further in college, I keep crossing interests off my list, and I think I’m down to three main ones:  sports/journalism, restaurants, and law.  From here, I now have a better frame of reference for which three of those paths I want to take now that the “spa industry” is apparently not up my alley.

So, thank you Canyon Ranch, you gave me a “life-changing experience”  =D.

***(Btw, I dropped HADM 6602.  Hopefully, I’ll find an elective more suited to my interests next semester …)

Okay, now it feels like Ithaca.  It’s been hovering around -200 degrees for the past week now, and it’s even starting to take a toll on my body.  I can never remember this happening to me before, but as soon as this mini-ice-age graced the Cornell campus, my face and hands have shriveled up into a dry, disgusting mess.

You know how it is when everyone once in a while, your hands get really dry and cracked?  Maybe even bleed?  Well, that’s happening to my face (not the bleeding part, thank god)!!!  For a couple days now, my face has felt so tight and dry that even talking and smiling are uncomfortable — nothing seems to work either; even when I scrub water into my face, it just makes my face even more alligator-like in texture.  Great.

So, I know you don’t really want to hear about that, but I told you that story to tell you this one.  With this new — albeit, unique — problem I have, I needed a solution.  Needless to say, this was driving me crazy.  Even eating was uncomfortable, and with how much I eat, that’s being uncomfortable all the time.

Well, where would I go to fix this?  Nasties, of course!  Yes, your friendly convenience store/eatery/drunk hangout/popular meeting place in RPCC.  You can get everything at Nasties, so I thought why not see if they have moisturizer.

They did.  And I bought it.  But … you know that look you get from the cashier at the store when you buy condoms?  They kind of give you a look like “you should be really embarrassed right now, and I’m gonna look at you really quick to make this situation more awkward for you.”  But when a dude buys moisturizer, it’s more like “does this guy know what he’s buying?  Maybe he thinks it’s shampoo or something …”

Not shampoo.  I wanted moisturizer.  Metrosexual as it may be, I needed moisturizer, and I got it.  So forge on metrosexuals, because (especially in the cold Ithaca weather), real men moisturize.

So I’ve had quite a while now to lounge and relax in recovery from this past semester; the rest was very necessary, and I still can’t get off the shnide of sleeping for a modest 11 hours a day.  Motivation and productivity definitely take a back seat over my winter breaks.

Reflecting back, I think that this past semester was one of the most important of my college career thus far.  Like 99% of kids that come to college, my interests are slowly (but surely) shifting and changing as I take more and more classes in the Hotel School.  Hospitality has always been interesting to me — especially health-related aspects of it — and this semester really tested what I was willing to go through to continue with the coveted “Hotelie” title.

Basically, what I thought I would find interesting, I didn’t.  Thought I would love Culinary — nope.  Was sure I would enjoy Development and Planning — worst class ever.  Managerial Accounting — ick … and so on.  None of my classes were interesting this semester, and I thought the teaching, class structure, etc. paled in comparison to other Hotel classes I’ve already taken.  Things seemed to be going downhill quickly.
The negative feelings I had for almost all of my classes were so strong that I thought seriously about pursuing other interests I have in government and law by transferring to a different school within Cornell — specifically, the School of Industrial and Labor Relations (usually called ILR around campus).  The price tag would’ve been half what I’m paying now for the Hotel School, since ILR is a contract college, and I’m a New York state resident.  Good reputation, good price, interesting ILR classes — what could go wrong?

Well, ILR didn’t feel right.  Once you get indoctrinated into the “Hotelie” way of life, you get to know the people.  You get to know the culture.  You get to know the professors.  And it’s hard to leave somewhere that feels like home.

The Hotel School is smaller than my high school was.  There are only about 200 kids in my class at the Hotel School, and I like to think that I’m good friends with a large portion of them.  People often get caught up in what direction they should be taking, which is exactly what I was doing with my thoughts of going to ILR;  I became too worried with a few boring classes and lost sight of why I came to the Hotel School in the first place.

A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine left me a FaceBook comment after I made my decision to stay in the Hotel School, saying, “So you chose passion over practicality, huh?”

Well ….. yeah.  Restaurants, health resorts, business — I like that stuff.  That’s why I came here.  ILR may be a flexible, reputable, and an even equally interesting degree, but it won’t get me to where I want to go (and I still like Hotelies better than everyone else =D).

So, in short, passion won.  Passion should always win.