Just as compelling as the first day, Reneta gave us a lecture on transient guests and distribution channels. From a customers perspective, it looks like you can just call or book a room online depending on whether there are rooms available, but there's a lot more that goes on behind the scenes. A work team reviews trends, outlines projections, and calculates whether they can get more money out of you or the next person. Reneta told us an interesting story about how her friend needed to book a group of people at Statler on orientation weekend. The manager at the time said no because she thought that she could make more money, but Reneta calculated that the group would actually bring in more money. And not only that, the group was a bunch of CEOs who offered to give an information session to Cornell students. For the rest of Reneta's lecture, we got to work on our reports.
As opposed to going to Trillium for lunch, we got to eat downstairs because a lot of dining halls were closed for the fourth of July. I finished eating quickly so that I could keep working on my memo. When lunch ended, we met with Mark who taught us more excel tools. We learned how to make a variety of charts and graphs for our reports.
The whole class met back in the lecture hall to learn about the meaning of hospitality. We were given a service assignment as a group. I was excited for this assignment because I love volunteering and I think that I'll be able to see more differences between California and the East Coast. Just a few days ago, my RCA and classmate were telling me about how their houses were flooded. I was shocked to hear that and I know we don't have floods in the Bay Area! We also watched a short movie about treating your customers and employees with respect. He compared it to a house guest, except customers won't hesitate to decline and take their business elsewhere.
Once class ended, everyone scrambled to the computer lab. We just learned so many tools and strategies that we had to apply to our reports. Now that I've gotten the hang of Office, I set a goal to be independent with my work. If I get stuck, I google it or look through my notes. My last resort is asking my group or TAs. I think the TAs are kind of like the class paramedics. They have more important situations to deal with than answering simple questions that can be found. We were forced to eat dinner at 6 PM. We all wanted to spend more time revising, but Mark and Reneta were just caring for our health. My group mate, Irene, and I had to decide where to eat quickly. Almost everything was closed except a bagel shop and RPCC. To get back earlier, we practically ran to RPCC, scarfed down our food, and went back to Statler. I finished around 8:30 with much panic. I wanted to design lots of different charts and graphs, but I didn't have the time to. Mark would holler with joy every time someone finally printed their report. He praised my report because I used a chess piece as a logo to represent CHESS instead of making up a name.
By the end of the day, the majority of my class had spent almost 12 hours in Statler. It was so much work, but we knew that we had to go the extra mile to achieve more and make a change, just like in the history of the USA(Okay probably not as important as our independence), but it's a step there! We didn't get to watch fireworks, attend the barbecue, or celebrate with family, but this is probably the closest we've been to being independent!
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