Signature Polytechnic Experience (PolyX)

HRT 3830 - Food & Beverage Operations course, exemplifies the best of polytechnic learning. Undergraduate students sharpen their practical professional experience at the Restaurant at Kellogg Ranch (our classroom laboratory). Students rotate weekly through various positions in both the front of the house and back of the house, in order to learn all aspects of a food & beverage operation. Our goal is to enhance student learning by allowing them to provide excellent service to paying guests, prepare quality menu items in the kitchen, develop individual leadership style by managing their peers, and create and execute strategic restaurant management plans- all within an optimized & controlled environment. Students receive industry-standard feedbacks & training through our experienced instructors. The course is regarded by industry experts as the equivalent of a top-quality "Manager-in-Training" program; known to many top brands and their talent acquisition teams.

The Learn Through Discovery Projects Hatchery (Hatchery) provides students support and resources to explore ideas that they are passionate about and turn them into projects that have real impact on communities. With projects ranging from applied research, start-up's, to community events, students from all disciplines engage in three phases that first allow them to explore their topic (through identifying and understanding the problem to be solved), further develop their idea (by preparing a proposal and budget), and finally, implementing and assessing the project (the Hatchery provides up to $8,000 in funding at this phase). Students receive peer, staff, and faculty mentoring during the process and cross-collaborate with other students and faculty within the Hatchery.

The course teaches students how to carry out ethnographic research from the development of a research question to a final conference presentation and ethnographic research article. Projects are health related and carried out in partnership with the Center for Health Disparities Research at UC Riverside’s School of Medicine. Students will gain an understanding of the social and structural mechanisms for how inequality “gets under the skin” while also gaining skills in participant observation, in-depth interviewing, life histories, material culture analysis, and qualitative data analysis using NVivo. Students are research assistants on the project and work collaboratively with undergraduate and graduate students at UC Riverside. The experience positions students for employment in the fields of social science research, public health, non-profit sectors and/or applying to graduate programs in anthropology, health sciences, and related professions. Past students have received intense mentorship, disseminated their research beyond the classroom, and work collaboratively on a multidisciplinary research team.