145 – TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl: UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

In the grand finale of the TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl, we visit one of the top-ranked hospitality programs in the country at UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management. The Dean of the college, Dr. Cynthia Mejia, joins the Suite Spot to discuss the hospitality school and why it is one of the most successful in the world! Check out the conversation with topics, including: 🎓How UCF Rosen Is Shaping Hospitality Leaders 🤝The Importance of Employer Partnerships 📉Navigating Current Industry Challenges And much more. Tune in now! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree and we are here with our TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl, and I am so excited for this episode. We are here at my alma mater, UCF, and who's joining me today is the Dean, Dr. Cynthia Mejia, UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management, the award-winning UCF Rosen College. Thank you so much Dr. Mejia, for being with me today. Dr. Cynthia Mejia : Wonderful. Thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure to join you. Ryan Embree: It's so exciting because like I said, this is my alma mater. This is where hospitality was ingrained. We always talk about DNA, but since this is your first time on the Suite Spot, we would love to hear about your hospitality journey and the path that led you to UCF Rosen. Dr. Cynthia Mejia : Wonderful. So, I was recently appointed as the new dean recently in June. And prior to that, I served as the interim dean since October of 2023. But I've been a faculty member here since 2013. When I first joined the college, and this is actually my second career, my first career for over 20 years, I ran food and beverage, and I was an executive chef out in the industry, mainly in the lodging side. And I ran banquets, large hotel restaurants, catering and events and operations. And then slowly moved up into operations within the hotel sector, small hotels and such. And so there, there came a point as people tend to know about our industry, that it's a lot of work. It can take a good number of hours. And after doing that for about 20 years, I took a little break. And I just, I decided to get married and start a family. And then that's when I began my journey into, to higher ed, getting my master's and then my PhD, and then thinking about the ways that I love this industry. I have a lot of passion for this industry, and, you know, how can I give back? How can I be part of the industry and help the future leaders of our industry thrive with what I've learned, good and bad things that I've learned along the way. And then the best practices, of course, that we teach in higher ed. So that's how it sort of all came together and came in as a faculty teaching food and beverage operations, facilities management, supply chain management. And then I moved into administration as an interim chair of my department, and then finally as the interim dean and now the dean. Ryan Embree: And it's quite a journey. And, it's the same mission that we have in this series is we're trying to get more and more people involved in this industry that you can tell by your journey you're extremely passionate about. I'm extremely passionate about, we're going through a staffing shortage. We'll talk about that a little bit in our industry, but 20 years celebrating 20 years at UCF Rosen and this college of Hospitality Management. For those who aren't aware, give us a little bit of history about this college and where it started to where it is literally one of the preeminent hospitality programs in the world right now. Dr.