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Organizing a banquet: it's more about the process more than the product.
For the guests they most certainly are! For the students who’ve spent the entire term preparing a short evening of happiness for the guests, it is much, much more than that. It is an intense journey of self-discovery and the type of transformative learning that makes Hotel Institute Montreux graduates so confident, prepared and successful after graduating.
For eight weeks, the students topping up your wine or rushing around the kitchen to get the next course out on time go through a transformative process which pushes them out of their comfort zones, challenges even the best of friendships, and forces them to address, not only their limitations, but how they are seen by those around them.
The banquet at Hotel Institute Montreux tries to mirror what students would experience in a real-life setting, the budget is fixed, just as it is with a living breathing client and the expectations to deliver on quality are genuine.
The banquet project allows students to put into place a lot of what they have learned during their journey at Hotel Institute Montreux so far. From costing out recipes, putting together standard operating procedures (SOP), pairing beverages with food and implementing rigorous and effective organisational charts. The banquet is the opportunity to finely hone the hard skills required to become future managers within the hospitality industry.
The banquet at Hotel Institute Montreux tries to mirror what students would experience in a real-life setting, the budget is fixed, just as it is with a living breathing client and the expectations to deliver on quality are genuine.
Being able to design a beautiful and colorful organizational chart is all very well and good but if you want people to follow it, you’ll need to master your skills in conflict management, negotiation, and flexibility.
Students are forced to confront the areas of their personalities that perhaps they never really knew they possessed.
To help the students with this, they have to give feedback to each other halfway through the process to help the individuals within the team discover their hidden strengths and identify areas that may need to be adjusted to suit the working environment they are in. This level of self-reflection can be difficult for most students but can be more rewarding than the cheers and claps of the guests, the exhausted group hug once the decorations have finally been packed away and the relief of waking up the morning after knowing, “I did it… We did it!”
The moments of stress, sometimes tears and frustration, have helped them one step further towards becoming the future leaders of industry they all have the potential to become.
Once the students have completed their banquets, they are asked to look at how their fellow students perceived their progress from the start of the term until after the banquet has been delivered. This is the moment of realisation of all they have accomplished. Not of how well the banquet was received by the guests, but how they have grown as individuals, and as a group.
The moments of stress, sometimes tears and frustration, have helped them one step further towards becoming the future leaders of industry they all have the potential to become.