A few years after graduating from Roosevelt’s Hospitality and Tourism Management Program in 1997, Aaron Michaels started a chef’s supply business in Florida that continues to grow by leaps and bounds today.

Another of the program’s alumni, Adrianna Szczecina Mendel, who left Roosevelt in 1999 to open a business, has had similar success. Her River Grove, Ill. Polish supermarket recently expanded to a second, larger location in Chicago.

Then there is the remarkable ingenuity of Chang Guan. She started one of China’s first destination management companies, which today has the ability to educate out-of-town visitors about more than 9,000 businesses in a major Beijing industrial zone.

“We have many, many stories like these,” remarked Gerald Bober, director of the Roosevelt program, one of the few in the nation and the only one in Illinois to offer both bachelor’s and master’s degree opportunities. “Whether they are starting their own business, or managing someone else’s, our students have an entrepreneurial spirit that is undeniable. It is one of the things that makes our program distinctive.”

Started in 1992, Roosevelt’s hospitality management program prepares students for leadership careers in lodging; food and beverage management; meeting, convention and exhibition management; tourism administration; sports hospitality; and club and gaming management. More than 1,000 students have passed through the doors of Roosevelt’s Manfred Steinfeld School of Hospitality Management.

Some have started restaurants, including: Shin Thompson (BSHTM, ’05), a highly respected chef who created the former Michelin-starred Bonsoiree in Chicago and recently followed that success by opening Furious Spoon in Chicago’s trendy Wicker Park neighborhood; and Blanca Murphy (BSHTM, ’10; MBA, ’13) whose upscale restaurant, Ambrosía, in San Pedro Sula, Honduras has received rave reviews by locals as well as visitors.

Others have created hotels, including Dimple Patel (BSHTM, ’01). Today, she runs a string of hotels in the Knoxville, Tenn. area, according to one of her mentors, Hospitality and Tourism Management Professor Chuck Hamburg.

“Whether they are starting their own business, or managing someone else’s, our students have an entrepreneurial spirit that is undeniable.”
–Gerald Bober, director of Roosevelt’s Hospitality and Tourism Management Program

“We want to foster and help students succeed with their ideas and plans,” said Hamburg, who has taught at Roosevelt for three decades and is also a restaurant consultant and leading expert in the food and beverage and hotel fields. “We consider it our job to give our students advice and introduce them to connections that will allow them to network and succeed in the field.”

“It wasn’t just the degree, but it’s also been about the connections I made through Roosevelt that got me started down my path,” said Michaels, who credits Hamburg with advising him along the way. Moving to south Florida a few years after graduating to work with a chef he met through Roosevelt, Michaels started Culinary Convenience Inc., a mobile chef’s supply store on wheels in 2002. Selling everything from kitchen equipment to cooking tools, Michaels has grown Culinary Convenience into a major restaurant-supply distributor in south Florida. In 2014, he also opened a standing chef’s supply retail store.

Szczecina Mendel, founder and proprietor of Ada’s, an 8,000-square-foot Polish supermarket in suburban Chicago, also credits Roosevelt with giving her the know-how to expand the Ada’s concept. “The program taught me the basics—business law, accounting, back and front-office management,” said Szczecina Mendel, who just opened a new 16,000-square-foot store on Chicago’s northwest side. “I use the principles I learned at Roosevelt every day when I train my employees in things like customer service. My Roosevelt experience taught me what I need to do to work successfully with people.”

William Host, associate professor of hospitality and tourism management and a leader in the program’s growing field of study in Meetings and Event Planning Management, believes the sky is the limit on where students can take their ideas and plans. “Destination management companies are big in the United States, but frankly there are not a lot of these companies in China,” said Host of the concept that Guan learned about at Roosevelt and turned into Link Group, which is now operating in Beijing.

Guan and her partners are building the company from her 80-page master’s thesis and business plan that she completed as a Roosevelt student. It calls for the company to one day serve visitors to as many as 150,000 information technology businesses in 16 separate industrial parks in Beijing.

“The fact that she (Guan) had a vision for something like this that is based on what she was introduced to in our program, is really significant,” said Host. “It’s a testament to the determination of our students and faculty.”