Nael Karpinski is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and a First Class Midshipman for the Navy ROTC. She can be reached at mnk59@cornell.edu.
I spent the summer in Boston, one of the greatest cities in the world, sitting in my cubicle at Pyramid Global Hospitality and the intern next to me wasn’t a hospitality major. Neither am I. The stereotype at Cornell is that if you work in hospitality, you're supposed to be a Hotelie. Or vice versa: if you’re a Hotelie, you’re supposed to work in hospitality.
Let me preface that words cannot describe what an incredible experience I had in Boston, on top of the awesome internship, outside of the office. Boston happened to be the place to be for the summer of 2026 with FIFA World Cup games, Boston 250 for the Fourth of July and the Tall Ships at Sail Boston 2026. I made an incredibly extensive bucket list, and proudly made my way through it — seeing and experiencing more of the city than I ever thought I could.
As a senior on campus I am a First Class Midshipman as part of Cornell’s ROTC, currently serving as the Tri-Service Brigade Executive Officer and the former Executive Director of the Cornell Slope Day Programming Board. In May, I’ll receive a commission as an active-duty officer in the Navy and serve our country for five years. I have been told by numerous people that I’d be a ‘great Hotelie,’ maybe because I’m outgoing and service-oriented. Instead, I study economics in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Out of high school, I was excited to ground myself in CAS and take four years' worth of classes within that college. I wanted to see the abstract relationship between supply and demand, and how the dynamic movement of money and credit behaved in and affected the world around me. But somewhere along the way I got curious about a different kind of economics: the abstract social and intrapersonal dynamics behind business. Exogenous and endogenous variables, sure, but also the strategy and logistics behind how a company actually runs. So, I made it a point to take classes at The Nolan School of Hotel Administration. Not because I planned or wanted to transfer, I took them because they were there, and because nothing in my major stopped me from taking them. From finance to real estate principles, those classes are the reason I ended up spending this past summer as I did.
Of all the courses I took bouncing between CAS and the Hotel School, the biggest thing I learned is that hospitality isn’t just hotel management. It's finance. It's real estate. It's market research, sales, marketing, logistics, accounting and leadership. That collage of disciplines is what took the summer from good to incredible. I learned a lot about hospitality specifically: how a hotel company thinks about real estate, how it prices risk, how it reads a market and more. If I'd been only a Hotelie, I might have known the ins and outs of every pro forma I looked at, but missed the wider and liberal arts contexts that I got from my classes in CAS. If I'd been only an Arts and Sciences student with no Hotel School classes at all, I'd have had the big picture thinking cap and none of the industry fluency. Neither version of me, on its own, would have been as ready for that internship as the combination brought me to be.
I came away with a better sense of business, but better yet, I now have a more grounded understanding of myself, my interests, what drives my ambitions and goals and the knowledge that my future is built upon the diverse foundations I set for myself.
Here's the pattern I keep noticing at Cornell: people arrive at their college and then stay there. Engineers take engineering classes. Industrial and Labor Relations students take ILR classes. Hotelies take Hotel School classes. Every college on campus is genuinely good at training people for its field, and there's real community and credibility that comes from committing to one school. But it also means most students only ever get one lens on the University when Cornell offers a dozen. Our ability to build broader perspectives before we jump into careers becomes limited and we miss out on meeting new people within the student body.
I'd encourage anyone reading this to go find a class outside their own college, in whatever corner of Cornell actually interests them, not because it looks good on a transcript, but because it changes what you notice. An engineering student sitting in on an Architecture, Art and Planning studio sees design differently afterward. An ILR student in an Agriculture class sees labor and land differently. A Hotelie in a CAS seminar sees the industry they're training for from outside it for once. You don't need a plan for how it'll be useful. Mine wasn't planned. I just wanted to explore an industry, in addition to the market. Chances are high that you’ll make a few new friends along the way.
Cornell’s motto exists for a reason: “... any person … any study.” Embody that. Go forth and act on that curiosity. By August, I stopped worrying about whether I was supposed to be in my internship. I realized the better question was what my undergraduate education as a whole could bring to the table.
Guest authors are people who submit pieces to The Sun and undergo the same thorough editorial process as any Sun staff writer. The Sun does not endorse the views of any guest author. If you would like to get in contact with the author of a Guest Room article, please use the undersigned author's email provided at the bottom of the article.
The Cornell Daily Sun welcomes any and all submissions of guest columns and letters to the editor for review. Please visit this website for information on how you can submit as a guest author to The Sun: https://www.cornellsun.com/page/join-the-suns-opinion-section. If you have any questions regarding this process, please contact us at associate-editor@cornellsun.com.
