Helping a Student Reach Out to Cornell, NYU, or UCF: What a Hospitality Teacher Learned from One Emailed Question
Andi stayed back after class one afternoon while everyone else filtered out of our small hospitality management lecture room. She was quiet the whole session, which wasn’t unusual, but she kept looking at me until the room emptied. Then she handed me her phone, showing me a LinkedIn message she had drafted. It was addressed to a student at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration. She asked, “Is this okay to send?”
I read it twice. The message was polite, a little formal, and very generic. It introduced her as a hospitality student in Manila, mentioned her interest in hotel operations, and ended with a vague hope to “connect and learn more.” Andi wanted me to edit it, but the real problem wasn’t grammar. The message had no reason for anyone across the Pacific to care.
Andi is exactly the kind of student who usually thrives: she runs the front desk of a small hotel in Quezon City on weekends, manages a roster of part-time food servers, and still gets her schoolwork done. She knows how to handle an overbooked hour better than many seasoned staff I’ve met. But when it came to reaching out to Cornell, NYU, or UCF, she wasn’t sure she had anything worth adding. She said, “They have big names. Why would they talk to me?”
That question is the heart of what she and a lot of students in similar positions struggle with. They assume connection comes from status or impressive vocabulary. In reality, it comes from clarity. The student who gets a response isn’t the one who says, “I admire your school.” It’s the one who says, “I run a reception desk in Manila and noticed your student-run hotel does a good job with guest recovery. I’d love to hear how your team trains for that.”
So instead of rewriting her message, I helped Andi think through what she actually wanted from this connection. She said she hoped to learn about how American hospitality programs approach operations, because the service culture there is different from what she experiences locally. That’s specific. That’s something a Cornell student, an NYU intern, or a UCF alumni might have an opinion on.
We spent about twenty minutes building a new outreach template over a torn sheet of notebook paper. Nothing fancy. Three sentences only. First, a factual introduction: who she is, where she works, what she’s studying. Second, a specific observation: in Manila, guests rarely receive follow-up calls after checkout, but she’d read about a US hotel that does it. Third, a question: would they be willing to share how such a system gets set up with limited manpower? She sent that message to two different people from each school. By the end of the week, she got one reply from a UCF graduate student and a polite no-reply from the others. That’s not a failure. That’s realistic.
This is something parents and teachers often misunderstand about these attempts to connect with big-named universities. They think it’s about getting a dust of prestige to put on a resume. But for a student like Andi, what matters more is learning that asking a stranger a well-formed question is a skill, and it’s one you can build without leaving home.
There are practical things I try to tell students who share Andi’s ambitions. First, use the school’s own channels rather than blasting general emails. Cornell’s hotel school has student clubs, NYU’s hospitality program has online info sessions, and UCF’s Rosen College often posts student work on public platforms. A student can respond to something visible, like a blog post or a video, rather than messaging a random person out of the blue. One of the messages Andi sent ended up being a reply-to-comment on a UCF student’s research about hotel staff retention. That got far more traction than a cold message ever would have.
Second, I encourage students to think about what they can offer, not just what they want to gain. Andi is fluent in both English and Filipino, she has experience in a busy Manila hotel, and she knows the local market deeply. A student in Orlando might be writing a paper on cross-cultural hospitality and would find her insight useful. That’s a leg to stand on. So when she gets a reply, she doesn’t just say thank you. She offers something small: a rundown of how traditional Filipino service customs work during fiestas. It gives the other person a reason to see her as a peer, not a supplicant.
Third, and maybe most importantly, is that conversations across schools, especially across countries, don’t build careers on their own. They build familiarity. Andi’s first successful exchange with the UCF student led to a second message about how they structure their practicum hours. She’s now considering applying, not because the name is famous, but because she has a clearer picture of what the program actually does.
There was a moment during our advising session when Andi admitted something I recognized in so many students. She said she’d been putting off sending any messages for weeks because she felt like an impostor. She kept thinking her experiences wouldn’t matter in an American context, that they only made sense here in the Philippines. That’s a quiet kind of self-doubt that parents and teachers rarely see because it shows up as procrastination, not tears. The kid says they’re busy, they’ll do it later, they don’t know where to start. When you dig a little, it’s not laziness. It’s fear of being dismissed.
I don’t know if Andi will get into Cornell, NYU, or UCF someday. She’s still hesitant about the cost and the distance from her family. But she’s already gotten something useful out of this, which is the sense that she can enter a conversation without waiting for a big name to validate her first. The one reply she received wasn’t a door opening wide. It was more like finding out her own door was already unlocked. She just hadn’t tried the handle.
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