Building My Own Hotel: Personal Project Analysis

The personal project is a significant body of work produced over an extended period and is a product of the student’s own initiative. It holds a very important place in the MYP and should reflect the student’s experience of the program. It provides an excellent opportunity for students to produce a truly creative piece of work of their choice and to demonstrate the skills they have developed through approaches to learning. My topic for my personal project is “Building and Designing my own hotel”, and I’ve chosen this topic because I will express my thoughts towards building and designing my own hotel, because the hotel that I will build is a thing

that I have wanted to see my whole life here in Saudi Arabia, but I was never able to find something as similar as the hotel that I’m trying to build. What I’m trying to make is a some 3D sketch planner that will represent the hotel that I will design, and I will have a 3D digital presentation that will show you the hotel from the inside, and its going to be working all the time during my presentation and it will make you able to see the hotel in a more 3rd dimensional way, that will consist of someone walking around the resort.

Every Personal Project needs a major goal that formulates a statement that can legibly shows the students goal based on his personal interests. My goal for my personal project is to express my two major interest in life which I think that I will be working on them on the future and put them all together into one thing, and I will try to make them related to each other, because I don’t want to have two different things combined together but have different facilities and features than each other. As mentioned before I will achieve my goal by making and designing the hotel and representing it on sketch planners and a digital presentation. In MYP, there is something called Global Context, which is really important to follow while doing a project because it helps by telling you what will you be doing while working on your project. So in my personal project my global context is “Personal and Cultural Expression”, and I will focus on personal and cultural expressions, and how can someone express his thoughts on something he loves and expands it into a major project. And this context connects to the goal and topic because what I will be making is a hotel that will be designed by me and I will express my feelings and desires by building this hotel, so that’s how it relates to my goal.

There are many things that I have already known about my personal project, which is building and designing my own hotel. There are many things that you have to know about how to build a hotel and how to start it. Unfortunately, way too many hotels are started by people who are completely unmindful of the fact that they could need anything more than that. Even more, unfortunately the ending is frequently disappointing, because they will have a product at the end but they weren’t able to have the mind to build the perfect hotel, so the whole work that they have worked had gone with no use. Because everybody never wants to spend there money on something that is not worth it, and pay huge amounts of money and they are not happy, so that’s why most hotels ends in that situation. Everyone must start with the location. Give it a rest for now and not concentrated more about streets, thoroughfares, zoning, traffic counts, etc. First, we want to make sure you’re in the right town and the right spot. But before we even do that, let’s make sure you have the right kind of hotel in mind. Because sometimes you will have everything and the location is perfect, but you have the wrong hotel in mind to build. So these are the things that I have already known about building and starting your own hotel, and now I will talk about what I desire to learn about building your own hotel. The most important thing that I want to learn about hotels is learn about the industry and the marketing of the hotel and the financial issues, because I just cant build a hotel without focusing one the amount of money that I have to spend on the hotel and etc. sometimes in mind, I can go for a huge imagination regarding building a hotel, but at the end I may not be able to fulfill the duties and the amounts of money that I have to spend. What I also want to learn, is what kind of offers and facilities that I have to put in the hotel to make it such a successful hotel, and I will be able to achieve that by searching into other well known hotels, because I’m pretty sure that they have the best knowledge regarding having the best way of building a hotel and not any hotel but a perfect one.

For every research there must be some skills on how a person is researching. So for my personal project I have to make some researches because there are many things that I have to learn and make in order to have the best knowledge towards building my own hotel. The first thing that I had to make was interviews, and this was very important to me because I will be interviewing major people that have an influence on their countries when it comes to hotels and designing, in that case its not hard for me to have an interview with hotel owners or designers, because my father owns a series of hotels which are really successful around Saudi Arabia and Dubai, so I have the ability to ask him what can I do and what are the perfect features that I have to make in my hotel. So I asked my father some questions that I wanted to know and he answered with specific answers that helped me a lot, and he also told that I have to interview the designers of the hotels that he owns so I can have a background knowledge on how I am able to design the hotel. So when I interviewed them, they said that the main things that I have to focus on is first of all I have to come up with the logo, because if I have the logo I will be able to make everything such as, the colors of the hotel, the design of the hotel, etc. One of the most important business women that I wanted to interview was “Arch. Naira Ashour”, the reason that made me want to interview her is because she is very important in Egypt and her words are also important when it comes to designing and whoever takes and advice from her is a lucky person. I also used some websites that helped me to understand my personal project better, I visited some major websites that major hotels owned, such as “Atlantis” and “Marriot”, because as you can see that Atlantis is one of the major resorts in the world and it is know by almost everyone in the world that have been travelling around the world, and they have really great designs that helped me come up with my own designs. Also I checked out the Marriot, because as you know that this hotel series is a worldwide hotel, because you can almost find it in every country and it is successful in every country too. And last but not least is a website called “The White Linen”, this website is managed by the Arch. Naira and her website helps to analyze the things that you will need in your hotel, and it helped by making choose the facilities that I will need in the rooms, and how many towels must every toilet contains, etc.

Part B: Planning

When it comes to grading my project, I will have more than one thing that I have to be graded for, such as having a 3D digital presentation on how the hotel looks from the inside and I was able to accomplish that by using “Google Sketch up” to make the animation presentation, and also I will have a sketch planner that I also used Google Sketch up to make, and it is a really large catalogue that will show you the hotel and show the perspectives of the hotel such as the elevations and floor planners, and it is actually made for people that wants a small presentation of my hotel.

So my first thought that came to me regarding the personal project was in March 2014, because I had a general information that we will have a personal project exhibition in 2015, so when I was in Dubai I was walking and suddenly I saw this huge model of a hotel that represented the hotel very well and I liked it a lot. And all of that is mentioned in my journal in a very specific detail. The only problem that I had in mind that I will be facing is planning the hotel, lets be realistic for a moment, for you to plan a new hotel takes a lot of thinking and also an architectural mind. So I first start planning my project with my mentor, which is Mr. Applegate and he gave me a sheet of paper that I had to fill, and in that piece of paper it had some questions and I have to answer them, and by answering these questions I would finish planning my personal project. And the plan contains things such as, duration of the project, goal, global context, research, report, and process journal. So when I was answering these questions I have everything planned for my project. One of the major things that I had to make is that I have to record everything that I make in a way so that I have to remember everything that I did and when did I do it. I was recording all of this information in a composition book, which we all call it a “Journal”. And the journal plays a huge role in my grade, because it is one of the major three things that I will be graded in. I started writing in my journal since March 2014, and I will have to complete writing in it until March 2015, so it’s a whole yearbook that I have to write on. Also one more thing that I have to focus on is being organized while working, and I have to take every step slowly because if I made everything last minute then my project will be very messy and not organized and well planned.

Time management is one of the major things that you need to have while working on a project such as a personal project, because there is a dead line for every part of the project and I have to bring that thing on time. So in that case I have to demonstrate self-management skills, so I can be able to finish my project in peace and with no rush from anyone. I will have a time that I have to stick to, so that I can hand in my project. The due date of the project is on April 15 2015, so I have to finish my report on March 19 so I can hand it to my mentor and he can go over it over the spring break and I will have a feedback right after we come back, the product must be handed in on April 15th or if it is a huge product I can bring it on the date of the exhibition, and journal should also be handed in on April 15th because I have to write in whatever relates to my personal project. The first thing that I have to finish is my product, because it is the main thing that I have to present during the exhibition day, and I’m still working on it, and I hope that I have my product finished at the due date. The other thing that needs to be finished before April is the report, because you will be graded on it, and you will not be able to receive your grade unless you hand in the report, because it explains everything that goes on in my personal project. The last thing that needs to be handed in on time is the journal, and the journal needs to be written in it until the very end, because I should work until the very end of the personal project date. I will also receive some corrections on things that I will have to also correct.

Part C: Taking Action

In response to taking action regarding my personal project, I have created more than one outcome/product. And the things that I will be presenting during the exhibition are the following: a digital presentation, sketch planner, and posters that I will be using as the main thing to present during my presentation. And my product response to all of the following, my goal and the global context. So my goal for my personal project is to express my two major interest in life which I think that I will be working on them on the future and put them all together into one thing, and I will try to make them related to each other, because I don’t want to have two different things combined together but have different facilities and features than each other. So my product relates to the goal, because in my product it shows an excellent demonstration of the resort that I was planning, and it was a combination of a hotel and entertaining things such as a park and a marina in Saudi Arabia. And this resort will be opened in Al-Khobar. And it is all planned in the three main things that I will be presenting. The global context that I choose was “Personal and Cultural Expression”, and I thought that it is the best to fit for the things that I want as well that it will help me express my personal expression, but I will not be able to express the cultural expression because the Saudi Arabian culture revolves around historical things such as, tents and sand. But the resort that I will design is a modern resort just like the ones that you may found outside of Saudi Arabia, such as the resort “Don Carlos” in Marbella as well as “Atlantis” in Dubai.

In my personal project I had people that guide me through the project by helping me thinking better regarding designing and etc. I got help from the Arch. Youssef Jarallah, and he guided me by helping me plan the resort, and helped me by sitting with me and started asking me questions such as “What is more significant in your life? Modern or historical and classical designs” so by these question I figured out how I want to design my resort that I’m planning to build it in the future. And when I talked with Arch. Naira regarding my topic of the personal project, she guided me by saying that I have to prepare a document that consisted the sizes, amount, and type of the towels and the beds that I will be providing in the resort.

I was able to demonstrate thinking skills by putting all my thinking towards thinking in a creative way, and I stayed so many nights thinking on how will I design my hotel. Believe it or not I had prepared another design that I worked for almost three months but I had to forget about it, because I knew that I will never find the facilities that I will be using for designing and building this hotel. It was a themed park hotel, which had transportations by roller coasters and having different types of games that surrounds and revolves around the hotel building. So it was one of the most interesting things ever, but unfortunately, I couldn’t, so I started thinking on the other most interesting thing that I have been planning for, but still I couldn’t let go of the theme park so I had to put it somewhere in the resort.

Part D: Reflecting

The Criteria of the product that I have been working on achieves a high-level grade, because I put a lot of thoughts and time working on it. And it presents a highly educated presentation compared to any other school presentation, because it is more likely to a business presentation and I learned how to do that from my dad. All of my life I have been going with him to conferences and see how he presents new things and what kind of things does he prepare before presenting. And the way that I made the things is a very amazing way, because the digital presentation took a lot of time create and it turned out to be amazing especially that it is in a 3D form.

The global context that I picked which is “Personal and Cultural Expression” helped me in many ways, and the things that it helped me most on are The way in which I discovered and expressed my ideas, feelings, nature, culture, beliefs and values in designing and planning for the resort that I created. Also it helped me in reflecting and enjoying my own creativity that helped me achieve a high level regarding constructing the hotel. So here I got to express everything that revolves around my life in designing this hotel, because my in hole life I always liked modern things and houses, hotels, and places that contained ceramic and blocks, and these are called modern flooring, because from before they only used rugs and mats to put on the ground, and some used wood. And here in Saudi Arabia there were never build any kind of resort that looked on the way that I wanted, all of them looks a bit old, even though if it is new. So the expression that I want other countries to have about Saudi Arabia is a good expression, because almost all countries around the world think that we are a “Ghetto” country and all of our transportation is with camels and etc. so that’s why by building a resort such as that, it will change their point of view of Saudi people and how do they live.

The IB learner profile that I most exhibited during my personal project is “Risk-taker”, I approach uncertainty with forethought and determination; and I work independently and cooperatively to explore new ideas and innovative strategies. I am resourceful and resilient in the face of challenges and change. So this reflects on me because I will be taking things on a new level in Saudi Arabia, because there are two things that I will be making that will some how change something in my country. The two things are, is that there is no way that you will find a hotel or a resort in Saudi Arabia that will even have a small park in it but the resort that I will be building will have it, and the second thing is that it will be a modern resort that will have as many activities that may come in your mind. And I was and will always be ready to face challenges and changes that will occur to my life and to my country strongly and positively, because life is all about taking risks and trying new things and that’s how you will be living adventures in life weather it was work, school, or anywhere else. Some of the ATL skills that I have used were “Thinking” and “Self-Management”, I used thinking because I did a lot of creative thinking as well as critical thinking, and I used self-management by organizing everything, and I was reflecting my self and my work a lot.