I spent most of my earlier professional career in the hospitality industry, and I am often asked why I decided to switch careers and teach.  The short answer is passion for training! I began entertaining the thought of teaching when I first entered college.  I didn’t just wake up one day and decide to become a professor. As an undergrad, my goal was to work my way up to the position of a General Manager within a 5-star hotel and then retire early so that I can teach. I loved the hospitality industry and was passionate about working in operations. However, something happened during my tenure within the industry;  I was given the opportunity to train a young man, and for some reason, the hotel that I was working for at the time could not locate the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) manual for the department.  Without a formal SOP or task list, I had to develop my own SOP and training material for this young man.  It was like developing an entire course from scratch, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The training plan I was putting together was supposed to be a two-week plan, but the trainee was able to learn and master his new job in less than a week.  I realized at that point that I was good at developing training materials and teaching.  And more importantly,  I loved it!  I gained more satisfaction from training another person than from anything else I had done within the industry.  It was at that point that my professional career goal began to shift, and I decided to pursue a career in academia as soon as I was done with grad school. (more…)