The purpose of Hospitality Management: A Capstone Course is to provide instructors of senior seminar courses with the necessary tools to teach the last class of the hospitality
curriculum. Usually offered in the last semester before graduation, this capstone course is aimed at preparing students for joining the industry, generally as manager-trainees.
In most cases, students in senior seminars have completed the majority of their professional, core, and general education requirements. As part of these courses, they have worked on numerous projects outside the classroom, have listened to industry guest speakers, and have conducted several in situ property inspections. At this juncture in their education, students are
actively interviewing for jobs or have already been hired by companies. It is the time to recall all they have learned before putting the mostly theoretical knowledge acquired into practice.
Because senior seminar students often have difficulty staying on task in the classroom but need to be primed for their imminent job entry into the industry, I recommend what might be
called a workshop approach that follows topic discussions in class and encourages the resolution of applied cases individually or through groupings of students of mixed ability. The operational situations and cases provided throughout this book illustrate real-life challenges and decisions that lower and mid-level managers face.
The senior seminar offers the last opportunity for students to review, refine and demonstrate the essential skills needed to get a job and to succeed in the industry, from competency in creative problem-solving, critical thinking, and effective oral and written communication to ethical reasoning, quantitative analyses, and the use of technology. After all, the majority of
graduating students will have to put these concepts into practice in a very short period of time.Graduate business programs with an emphasis in hospitality can use this book as an introduction to graduate courses. The book could provide a useful compendium of the knowledge necessary to access graduate-level courses for students joining these programs on completion of a bachelor's degree or on entering the program directly from the industry.
Although it is not intended as a test tool or as an in-depth and comprehensive study, the book can nevertheless be used as a pragmatic means for the assessment of hospitality college
programs by requiring students to keep individual portfolios of work performed in the senior seminar class. Thus, hotel and restaurant management administrators can obtain academic
feedback to measure the outcomes of their programs of study. From the information gathered, program directors can readjust curricular contents and teaching methods to improve
instruction.
