About
Students Learning at the Hotel
The Statler Hotel: Supporting the Teaching Mission
In 1986, Dean Jack Clark envisioned the new Statler Hotel as a "management laboratory" with classes integrated into the operation of the hotel and students working part-time to get their "first opportunity at break-in management experience." Today, The Statler Hotel fulfills that vision and has become a primary teaching tool and venue for the Hotel School while employing some 200 of the school's students across all hotel and restaurant operations.
Several required and elective courses are integrated into the hotel. The introductory hotel and food service operations classes H ADM 105 and 106 require practicum's where students gain an exposure to operations by working alongside the hotel's regular staff for work shifts in each division. Students in the school's restaurant-management class (the laboratory portion of H ADM 305) interact with real customers in the hotel's new Taverna Banfi. In electives like H ADM 403: Guest Chefs, world-renowned chefs working in the Statler's main kitchen lead students through the preparation and service of an upscale dining experience.
During the school year, The Statler Hotel regularly employs 200 students from the Hotel School in a range of front-line positions, such as bartender, bellperson, conference houseperson, cook, guest service clerk, reservationist, turndown service attendant, and waitperson. Several students are also hired to work in back-of-house support areas such as accounting, facilities, human resources, information technology, and sales. The hotel's recently established Statler Leadership Development Program (SLDP) gives selected students an opportunity to gain supervisory or managerial experience (see link for more information). Many of the student jobs in the hotel may meet the Practice Credit requirement of the undergraduate curriculum.
In addition to the integration with classes and student jobs the Statler Hotel provides, there are other ways in which the hotel supports the school's teaching mission. For example, actual Statler Hotel operations data are often compiled, reviewed, and analyzed by students as a regular part of the curriculum in courses in accounting, human resources, marketing, operations, and statistics. Hotel staff members are often called upon to guest lecture in the classroom and provide assistance with student projects, and several hotel staff members serve as teaching support specialists for the management laboratories.
The Statler Hotel also serves as the venue for one of the school's long-standing traditions, Hotel Ezra Cornell, which gives students with the opportunity to take over the entire operation of the hotel for a weekend.