I studied my BSc Cruise Managment degree at Plymouth University and it consisted of 3 years studying at university and then an optional placement year with a cruise company.
First Year
My first year at Univeristy was the most nerve racking, this is because it was something completely different and I felt out of my comfort zone, however it wasn’t as bad because I live in Plymouth and chose to live at home rather then move into student accommodation. University helped out when it came to starting, prior to the actual lectures beginning because they held an event on Plymouth Hoe for ‘freshers’, we had the opportunity to meet other people on the same course as us so we knew people before we had our first lecture.
In my first year at university our topics consisted of sustainability, food and beverage sector and product knowledge in restaurants,also to add up credits I had to choose another subject and I chose to do Spanish. We also got the opportunity to do a couple of weeks doing work experience, mine was done at two locations, the Copthorne Hotel Plymouth and Mount Battern Cafe. During my time at Copthorne Hotel we shadowed different departments and learnt what they did on a day to day basis and then at Mount Battern cafe I also did the same here, this was more hands on work and I actually served people and it was less about shadowing and watching. It was a great opportunity considering I had never worked in this kind of sector.
Freshers Event
Second Year
The second year at university was more challenging because the first year was more like an introduction to university and to help get us used to the writing style such as havard referencing and the diference between an essay and report, and this you learn as you go, you have to do it multiple times to know and understand how to do it.
In my second year I learnt about a lot to do with cruise ships such as health and safety onboard and different legislation rules and regulations also about how things operate onboard and what they have to offer.
In the second year we had the opportunity to learn a lot about the food and beverage sector through other modules, we got the chance to visit Rockfish which is situated on Plymouth Barbican and here we got a talk about pricing and how they work costings out and we also got the opportunity to have some food there. We then got the chance to go on another field trip to Riverford Field Kitchen, we learnt about their business and their own food that they grow and serve to the public or can visit.
Final Year
The final year was the most important because this is when yours Dissertation comes into action, you can choose what your topic is out of around 150 choices, alongside your Dissertation there’s a couple more modules that you do alongside. In my final year I learnt about service innovation, this revolved around the importance of service quality and introducing new types of service in hotels and restaurants, I also undertook a module called leadership.
In the leadership module we learnt about different types of leadership and we got the chance to undertake something called 30 hour challenge, during this challenge we spent 30 hours away at a place called Skern Lodge, here we were split into multiple groups of around 8 and we had to complete many different challenges and each challenge we were scored on points and we count towards our overall score. When we was first told about the 30 hour challenge I was very apprehensive about it because it meant mixing in a group with people I didn’t know and having to spend 30 hours with them. However despite there being some ups and downs during the challenge it was a great opportunity and we got to learn about different learning styles and other people which was different from being in a classroom and learning from a screen.
For more information on Cruise Management at Plymouth University follow the link below.
https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/bsc-cruise-management
Travel with me 