UNLV ready to open new home for its hospitality college

Hospitality Hall, a new home for the William F. Harrah College of Hospitality at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, will debut in a grand opening ceremony later this month. Students will begin attending classes in the building Jan. 16.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that university officials placed the four-story, 93,500 square-foot building at the center of campus, only a few steps from the university’s Lied Library and the Classroom Building Complex.

In addition to 16 classrooms, the $59 million building has numerous meeting and office spaces, a high-tech kitchen, a student-run cafe and a PGA Golf Management learning center, which has a putting green, retail store, a club repair shop, a golf simulator and a swing diagnostics lab.

When entering through the main doors of the building, students will see a grand staircase beckoning them up the stairs into the classroom and office spaces.

Sunlight floods the first-floor lobby through floor-to-ceiling windows and contributes to an airy space for students to meet, study and complete work.

“The whole idea is we wanted to create a space that represents the type of space students will be working in once they graduate,” says Stowe Shoemaker, dean of the Harrah College. “When you think of hospitality space, you think of wanting to be pulled right in.”

A second-floor, 120-seat auditorium features soundproofing to help carry the voice of a professor, without a microphone, to a student in the back row.

The fourth floor houses a state-of-the-art kitchen and sweeping views of the Las Vegas Strip.

”We want to say, if you come to UNLV, we’re totally tied into the industry,” Shoemaker says. “We’re not a hospitality school located in the middle of nowhere, but we’re very much tied into the industry. And what better way than to show the Strip?”

Harrah College has an enrollment of about 2,300 students. A majority of students earn a bachelor’s degree in hospitality management, but also have the ability to choose a concentration in gaming management, meetings and events, PGA golf management, or restaurant management.