Yerko checks in to hospitality's welcoming ways

Yerko Alpysbay
Blaine Friedlander/Cornell Chronicle
Yerko Alpysbay, a rising senior at Ithaca High School from Kazakhstan, immersed himself in the Cornell Summer College course for hotel operations management.

Meet Yerkebulan Alpysbay. That’s Yerko, to his friends. A rising high school senior from Kazakhstan, he has just finished a three-week School of Hotel Administration hospitality course at Cornell University Summer College.

Alpysbay took an unusual path to Cornell. He joined his mother two years ago while she was pursuing a master’s degree in public policy at Cornell. He knew no English, had no friends here and was frustrated communicating.

Fast-forward to today. Alpysbay speaks fluent English after two years at Ithaca High School, where he swam on the school’s varsity team. He keeps in touch with his friends on Facebook and diligently tweets. He applied to Cornell Summer College, was admitted, and with the help of a friend raised all the money for the tuition.

Like many visitors before, he arrived in New York City and looked in awe at its immensity. He stepped off the airliner at age 15 and into a city larger than his imagination, he says. His first meal on U.S. terra firma: a hamburger. “I was shocked at the culture in a good way. It’s very crowded, and I had never seen subway systems like that,” he remembers.

Alpysbay grew up in Korday, Kazakhstan, on the border of Kyrgyzstan and a few hundred miles from the Chinese border. Korday has a population of about 30,000, in a country of 17.6 million people. While he says it’s very cold in Kazakhstan – much like Ithaca – it’s also very warming and welcoming.

If nothing else, Alpysbay gravitates to warm and welcoming. “Before the course started, I read the book ‘Four Seasons’ by Isadore Sharp. It deepened my interest in hospitality,” he said.

In his Summer College class, he learned about various hotel departments – the front desk, housekeeping, catering, food service, entertainment – and other influences on the guest experience.

Instructors Reneta and Mark McCarthy had Alpysbay and his classmates run a simulated 250-room hotel. The budding hoteliers crunched numbers to understand revenue and expense management, and they learned to comprehend a full-service hotel’s financial statement. “I was not expecting that kind of level of work,” he said. “The first two weeks were challenging for me, but by having a group, a team to work with, we were able to combine our ideas and complete assignments,” he says.

The students handled writing assignments, quizzes and group presentations. His group studied the Best Western hotel chain’s history and management structure.

Alpysbay will spend his senior year in Ithaca, attending Ithaca High School and applying to U.S. colleges. Eventually, his goal is to bring his business acumen and his understanding of hospitality back to Kazakhstan.

“The course was really teaching me a lot about the hospitality industry; it’s a very challenging industry,” he said. “After several weeks learning so much new stuff about different hotels, hotel brands and services, I’m in love with hospitality.”

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