Jie Wu and Keith Roberson

A Chinese student in her junior year at a prestigious Swiss hotel management school will soon complete a yearlong lesson in Southern hospitality at a North Georgia resort. 

To fulfill a requirement of the international hotel management degree program at Switzerland’s Ecole Hoteliere Lausanne, 29-year-old Jie Wu has spent the past 11 months working at Forrest Hills Mountain Resort in Dahlonega, a historic gold mining town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains about 60 miles north of Atlanta.

Throughout the intensive program, Ms. Wu has lived on resort property and learned its operations from the ground up, performing almost all tasks that keep the hotel running.  For the last seven weeks before she returns to Switzerland, she is serving as the hotel’s acting general manager.

In that role, Ms. Wu attended a June 12 China tourism forum at the World Trade Center Atlanta aimed at preparing the state and the Southeast region to accommodate more Chinese visitors.

There, she told GlobalAtlanta that she chose Forrest Hills because the resort’s leadership made it easy for her to get hands-on experience and interact with customers at all levels of management.

A native of the city of Nanjing in China’s Jiangsu province who has lived and studied in the U.K. and Switzerland, Ms. Wu said she has enjoyed the open, relaxed environment the hotel has provided for learning business and cultural aspects of leading a hotel’s staff.

“Compared with Asian culture, I see a lot more of creativity and independence here—a willingness to take hardships in starting a small business and growing it into a big business,” she said.

Also, since the resort is away from large metropolitan area, it allows her to experience an authentic experience of the U.S. sometimes masked by big-city life, she said.

The internship program stemmed from Forrest Hills co-owner Denise Roberson’s ties to Ecole Hoteliere Lausanne, where she earned her MBA. 

Keith Roberson, Ms. Roberson’s husband and director of the hotel’s conferencing department, said Ms. Wu’s sustained presence at the hotel helped raise its staff’s international consciousness.

“It has opened the eyes of our local team and made us much more internationally focused,” Mr. Roberson said. 

That’s a natural priority for someone who spent most of his career working outside the U.S. for global companies like AT&T, CB Richard Ellis and Johnson Controls.  

And as the busy summer season approaches, Mr. Roberson said the resort will manage its staffing needs by recruiting interns from around the world.

The day before the China tourism event Mr. Roberson and Ms. Wu attended in Atlanta, Forrest Hills welcomed five new interns from Shanghai University in China who are spending their summer vacation working at the hotel.

Mostly finance and IT majors, the students will complete an analysis that will help the resort forecast future revenues. 

They soon will be joined by three more Chinese students and two students from Turkey. The internship program is managed through a State Department agency.