The Boston University School of Hospitality Administration is becoming a force in fueling the hospitality industry with smart, young professionals from diverse backgrounds — the school boasts over 50 percent female students and about 20 percent international students.
It also has a major asset in Assistant Professor Erinn Tucker, who is teaching her students that hospitality experience opens doors well beyond just working at a hotel or restaurant, and that they can play a major part in the U.S.’s increasingly service-oriented economy.
“So many industries rely on professional services. Hospitality is even more relevant,” Tucker said. “Now, companies are coming to us because they need people who understand hospitality and customer service.”
As an example, Tucker cites law firms which are now looking for professionals that can handle client-engagement to keep customers satisfied and coming back. They don’t need law school graduates for this kind of work — they need someone who knows customer-service inside and out. They need hospitality professionals like the students that graduate from BU and Tucker’s classes.
Tucker, who joined BU in 2011, says she can sit down with professionals in any industry, from finance to technology to medicine, and make a hospitality connection, and so can her students, which makes them very valuable.
Another evolution in hospitality education is the ambition of the students.
While the hospitality industry has been fueled by the labor of immigrant workers and their families on the front lines, many second- and third-generation children from hospitality families are now viewing college as a way to advance higher up the ladder in a business they grew up in.
A degree in hospitality is not just about getting a job at the front desk of a hotel. It is about learning the business behind the business, including marketing, operations and ownership.
“Many of our students go into the corporate side,” Tucker said. “Those are the people you don’t see.”
What the best students are able to do is put their experience in the hospitality industry — jobs they had when they were younger working at hotels or restaurants and the 400 hours of industry experience required by BU to graduate — to good use in innovation that is changing the way the industry operates.
Tucker praises this changing attitude showcased by millennials.
“They see the value of working in hospitality as a career and not just a job,” she said.
And if you think Tucker’s illustration of the changing nature of the hospitality industry and hospitality education is superlative, she has only to point to herself as an example.
She is a hospitality professor with a background in event marketing and sales, corporate sponsorships and special events.
Tucker began her long road to academia at a sports agency in her native Chicago after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Florida A&M University in 1997.
This early job made her realize she wanted to work on the corporate side in sports, not with the players, and drove her back to school after a year to get a master’s degree in sports administration from Florida State University.
After Florida State, she got some impressive experience with the Orlando Magic, then the PGA Tour, work she was able to swing into a four-year gig with General Motors back in Chicago in charge of corporate sponsorship of sports teams. She worked at GM from 1999 to 2002 and then moved back down south to Charlotte, N.C., to work in group sales and corporate events for the then-named Jillian’s Entertainment.
During her time with Jillian’s, she also picked up another degree, this time her MBA in business administration from Winthrop University.
But all the while her true calling was looming. She just didn’t know it.
A fortuitous collision with the director of admissions from Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte in 2004 put her on a path to teaching. The Rhode Island-based school was opening a new campus at the time and booked an event — handled through Jillian’s by Tucker. When the director heard about her sports management experience he asked her to come to speak to Johnson & Wales’ students about it.
The lightbulb went off for Tucker.
“When I went in and spoke, I knew this is what I want to do,” Tucker said. “It was literally
a calling.”
Soon Tucker was an adjunct faculty member at Johnson & Wales. By 2005, she left Jillian’s to pursue teaching full time. Not long after that, she entered a doctoral program at Oklahoma State University — a Ph.D. is necessary for advancement in college academics — and after several years of part-time study back-and-forth from Charlotte, left Johnson & Wales to finish her degree fulltime in Oklahoma in 2008.
When she graduated with her doctoral degree in 2011, with her Johnson & Wales experience and several summers teaching hospitality at the Singapore campus of UNLV, she was quickly snatched up by BU.
It was another big move to another part of the country, but she has no regrets. She loves teaching and working with students every day, bringing all her varied experiences to bear.
“What makes me happy is when I see them start thinking broader than what they have previously experienced,” she said.
Above all else, she wants her students to go out after graduation and find something they love to do — just as she has.
“I think it is really important that when they are pursuing their dreams they should be more concerned about finding a good fit than anything else,” she added.
