HOSPITALITY STUDENT JOURNEY: Finding My Footing | Part 3

Early in 2026, we decided to follow the career progress of a young Filipina whose lifelong dream has been to become a Hospitality professional.

A young woman from a modest family in Iloilo province overcame her parents’ objections, empty pockets, and years of doubt to enroll in a Bachelor of Science in Hospitality Management, proving that passion, persistence, and a little help from government support can unlock even the heaviest doors.

Follow her journey with Discovering Hospitality each and every month to see the highs and challenges that come our way in life.

Part 3:

Finding My Footing. Second Semester Realities, New Pressures, and Quiet Breakthroughs

(Elena “Elle” Santiago – BS Hospitality Management, St. Paul University Iloilo | Early 2027)

The second semester started with a different kind of energy. The wide-eyed excitement of my first months had settled into something steadier; determination mixed with a clearer understanding of how hard this path really is. I no longer felt like a visitor in the hospitality program. I was becoming part of it. But becoming part of it also meant facing sharper challenges.

This is the honest update on the stretch between the end of my first semester and the middle of my second, the months when the dream started feeling less like a story and more like daily work.

The New Academic Load

Subjects on this term felt heavier and more connected to real operations. Hospitality Accounting forced me to confront numbers I used to avoid. Cost control, pricing strategies, and basic financial statements for hotels and restaurants made my head spin at first. I spent extra evenings in the library with classmates who were stronger in math, trading explanations for the practical insights I could share from my gap-year resort work.

Human Resource Management in Hospitality opened my eyes to the people side of the industry; recruitment, training, motivation, and the very real problems of high turnover and burnout. It hit close to home. I began seeing my own part-time café shifts and library work through a new lens: how managers either support or drain their teams.

Practical classes continued to demand precision. One advanced Food and Beverage Service session involved full banquet service simulations. I was assigned as captain for a mock wedding reception. Coordinating the team, timing the courses, and handling a “difficult guest” (played by a sharp-eyed professor) tested everything I had learned. We pulled it off, but not without a few near-misses. The feedback was constructive: “You lead with calm, but you need to check in with your team more often.” I wrote that note in my notebook and have been practicing it ever since.

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