Building a Strong Foundation
At Virginia Tech, we believe the success of hospitality and tourism enterprises depends on the quality of the people involved. Admission to the Pamplin College of Business is very competitive; we attract the bestand the brightest. The quality of our students is demonstrated by the number of HTM graduates who hold executive management positions in major hotel and restaurant corporations in the U.S. and throughout the world.
HTM students typically graduate in the top 15 percent of their high school classes and bring a strong goal-oriented focus to Virginia Tech. Further, many choose to double major in such areas as marketing and management, or pursue a minor in business leadership, real estate, or global e-commerce gaining knowledge and skills they will need as they progress through their careers. As such, the Hospitality and Tourism Industry has access to a pool of highly qualified potential employees' business professionals with a focused expertise in the management and operation of hospitality/tourism enterprises. Moreover, the new HTM connection with the Pamplin College of Business is also building Hilton name recognition among many other highly qualified business students within the college.
We are also attracting high performing faculty to Pamplin. Last year Professor Richard Perdue joined the college's 110 world-class faculty as the head of the HTM department. He previously spent 15 years as a professor of business in the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, where he worked closely with Vail Resorts, Inc. on issues of service quality, marketing, and strategy. Professor Perdue is an internationally recognized scholar who studies resort development and marketing. He is the editor of the Journal of Travel Research, the premier tourism research journal, and a Fellow and current president of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism.
