Tech Hospitality Students Place 3rd in National Contest

A team of Texas Tech hotel and retail management graduate students placed third in the inaugural Student Market Study Competition hosted by Smith Travel Research, or STR, during the annual HX: The Hotel Experience conference held in New York City last month.

Twenty-nine teams competed, and seven were selected as finalists. Tech’s team was the only qualifying one from Texas.

STR_TEAM

Jessica Yuan, an associate professor in the Department of Hospitality and Retail Management, said her students worked diligently and for days to prepare for the contest.

Yuan’s advanced hospitality financial management class created a market analysis presentation of a hotel/motel development in Dallas, Texas. The students included Mara Driscoll, Victoria Elam, John Long, Rachel Young, McDaniel Ubi, Jaehan Min and Wen-Ting Liao.

With help from doctoral candidates Jihye “Ellie” Min and Sang-Kwon “Harold” Lee, the class worked on a dataset sent by STR, Yuan wrote in an email to the Hub@TTU.

John Long, one of the five team representatives who went to New York, said the competition provided a much different experience than a regular class.

“It was really a more practical approach to learning,” Long said. “Not very many other classes teach you how to look at a full, broad-spectrum market like we did in the competition.”

Wen-Ting Liao said the competition enhanced his college education and career prospects.

“I learned a lot through this experience, especially in the financial department,” Liao said. “Competing in New York will definitely help in my future career path.”

If a second competition is held by STR, Yuan said, she would love to take a Texas Tech team to finals in 2016.

About Breann Robinson

Senior journalism major and Investigative Reporter for the Hub@TTU. Really good at making friends, really bad at math.