“Networking is not just about connecting people. It’s about connecting people with people, people with ideas, and people with opportunities.”
- Michele Jennae
This year, 2nd Year student, Elise Jarron; 1 Year Track student, Alex Kudla; and myself traveled to Berlin alongside Professor Nicolas Graf. The three days spent at the Intercontinental, Berlin proved to be a truly unique and valuable experience for the three of us. We had the opportunity to meet countless IMHI alumni, in addition to other industry professionals from around the world, as well as attending the many interesting and provocative conferences on the trends and challenges in hotel investment.
Elise Jarron summarized her experience at Berlin with two words: “exhausting, but rewarding. These few days have been a mix of meeting very interesting people, helping to organize the conference and sleeping very few hours. It is quite intimidating to network with such important people who are there for business, but so exciting. It’s been a great experience to participate in such a unique event, where all people from the hospitality world come together for a few days.”
Indeed, the experience, apart from being eye-opening, was also a lesson in time and energy management. In exchange for attending the conference, we were required to help prepare the event and assist in daily administrative tasks with the event organizers. All of this resulted in very little sleep for the three of us, but it was nevertheless a worthwhile experience.
Alex highlights another of the main takeaways from this conference: the opportunity to learn about different career paths in hotel investment. As future graduates, speaking to professionals working for diverse organizations and players within this complex world opened our eyes to the various roles that we could aspire to upon graduation. From asset management to development to consulting, we saw the many opportunities that exist and the many ways that we as individuals could provide value in the future.
Ultimately, the three-day conference was all about one thing – networking – and highlighted the value in bringing together people, ideas and opportunities in one place at one time. We are very grateful to have experienced IHIF and with new relationships, new ideas and new aspirations, we return to IMHI to complete the last few months of our academic journey.