Most people don't realize the full extent of what all the hospitality industry entails. Much more than just working in a restaurant or hotel business, at the root of the industry is an objective so extraordinarily clear and simple, yet absolutely essential to the most basic of human needs -- making people happy.
A long way from her native Brooklyn, New York, upbringing, Eve Victory, as part of the National Park College hospitality faculty, realizes that importance and has sought to give her students a rather broad fundamental perspective in preparing them for life after college.
"We are the industry that makes everybody happy," she said. "You're going on vacation, you're having a break, so imagine if we don't know how to behave or treat you or take care of you or fulfill your expectations. You're going to have a crappy time because of us. And (the students) need to understand how important that is."
Now in her ninth year teaching at NPC, Victory says she loves every second of it. After graduating high school in Brooklyn, she went on to attain her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at Westchester, N.Y., which, she notes with a laugh, "did absolutely nothing for me." She was soon introduced to the world of events and established a career in graphic design, marketing communications and event planning, which later led her to the west coast for four years before ultimately settling in Hot Springs.
While working in both New York City and San Francisco, Victory was responsible for rebranding and developing customer communication strategies of multiple companies, as well as managing million dollar tradeshow and meeting budgets. It was during this time she met her future husband who worked in sales, based out of Hot Springs. She said even with the vast amount of traveling she did as a kid and of all the places she has seen, she instantly fell in love with Hot Springs.
Victory happened to live two houses down from NPC's then director of career services, Mary Kay Wurm, who invited her to check out the campus some time. As one whose hobbies include reading and taking random online courses "just because I can," she decided to go through the college's hospitality program herself. Upon graduating and starting her own personal chef company, Chiffonade Chef Services, she took over for retired instructor, Karla Nardi.
"I kind of fell in love with this entire program," she said. "Even when I went through it, and then being fortunate enough to actually take it on. ... I kind of wanted to make it more management-based than just food and beverage-based. Hospitality is a whole lot more than people give it credit for. They automatically think, 'Oh, restaurants,' or, 'Oh, we'll stay in a hotel.' It's much, much wider spread and the students needed to have a more global scope of what it covers. So we took what was there and sort of molded it so it included more of the branches of hospitality."
Along with adding the "events" aspect in with the restaurant management course to where students are not only creating a menu, but now an entire themed event, Victory also took out a couple of courses and made an actual tourism course "so that they understand this is a global, huge industry."
"It's really the No. 1 industry in the whole entire world," she said of tourism. "You have to have some kind of perspective of how it affects everything else."
She also added in a leadership class, which, she noted, is particularly important for hospitality.
"People don't realize that when you're standing for eight to 10 hours a day and even when you're serving in a restaurant, you have to be on your best behavior 24 hours a day if you do it right. Of course, you can do it wrong but if you do it right, there's an extraordinary amount of emotional labor involved in that. But we have an internship and hospitality class, which really does introduce them to any job and any career they could possibly want. Whether it's in private clubs -- like country clubs or casinos -- obviously, like Oaklawn. It's very, very strange how hospitality-based Hot Springs is and how it fits all of our scenarios. We go through 'give me examples of this' and they're just like, 'Wow, we didn't even realize we had that here,'" she said.
Even though she never dreamed she would one day live in the Spa City, part of why she liked it so much was because it reminded her of upstate New York.
"There's just enough arts and culture to kind of satisfy me," she said. "Don't get me wrong; I miss lots of things. Like, I miss the accessibility to museums constantly. That was the big thing for me. But Hot Springs has its own charm. Now that Bathhouse Row is so, not touristy, but so well-developed, I go down there pretty often and I stroll. And I'll go to West Mountain and I'll stroll. I talk to people; they're like, 'Why are you still there?' I'm like, 'You need to see for yourself and you'll understand.' I sent one of my friends that I went to college with (at Westchester) one of the big, fat printed brochures at one point, and he goes, 'There's a whole lot more down there than I thought.' I'm like, 'Yeah.' I said, 'You should probably bring the whole family, you're going to have a good time.'"
Victory said it's important that her students understand the idea of tourism involves much more than people going on vacation, but that it affects the world from an economic, environmental and sociological perspective.
"It changes their opinion an awful lot about what they do. It gives them more purpose," she said.
She said one cannot deal correctly with hospitality without understanding the culinary and lodging side as well.
"You have to understand how incredibly important food is," she said. "And giving them that extra idea of, 'Wow, this is much more intricate a pursuit than I realized,' helps too. In the spring, we have a hotel operations class, which is completely and totally dedicated to lodging. Lodging is a huge part of hospitality and tourism and it deserves its own, entire class."
The leadership class, she notes, is one that probably all students could take, although it is particularly important to hospitality because it affects how an individual gets promoted in their career.
"If you have leadership qualities -- which are essentially like interpersonal communications, problem solving, these things that the way to keep yourself level-headed, even body language -- if you understand those things, you're going to get promoted extraordinarily quickly," she said. "I have a student who literally became a general manager of fast food facility in two years because she was different. You know, she exhibited the things that were needed. Yeah, she was first on the line, but they saw how hungry she was -- haha -- to learn. And it changes lives when people actually see, 'Oh, so if I'm the right kind of person, I can get my foot in this door and they're going to see my value.' Hospitality has this huge turnover rate. It's 300%. So when they see someone who's got it, they don't want them to leave. They want to just keep pushing them up."
While unsure of what the future holds, Victory says she is extremely happy with her position teaching at NPC and overseeing her personal chef business. Growing up with a Sicilian grandmother, whom she spent a lot of time with, she learned firsthand the old ways of cooking what goes into making a dish extra special.
"I think about retirement a lot," she said. "I'm not going to lie. I have lots of things that I want to do. There's lots of traveling I haven't gotten to do yet. I might have one more entrepreneurial something in me aside from Chiffonade. But this job has ... I teach my students about Abraham Maslow (American psychologist known for creating Maslow's hierarchy of needs) every year and I know I'm not the only one who does. When a sociologist makes it nice and easy with a pyramid that tells you what people -- human nature -- wants, it really applies to everything. This job has it all. The self-actualization at the very top is having something that has meaning and is the hardest thing to acquire. To this day, this many groups later, I'll still look at them (students) when they're taking an exam and I get a lump in my throat thinking about all those brains working and how they're going to someday realize that they got value from this. And, 'What are they going to do with their lives?' 'Where are they going to go?' It's rewarding every single day."