Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Joe Downtown: Cambridge grad students to offer expertise to the Plaza

Map of Plaza Hotel and Casino

Plaza Hotel and Casino

1 Main Street, Las Vegas

First came Venture for America’s college graduates, several of whom were hired by Downtown Project for two-year stints to study, learn and help startup businesses.

Then a few weeks ago, 14 students from the University of Iowa in a class devoted to "reimagining" downtown Las Vegas spent their spring break here and will return this summer.

Now students from Cambridge University – yes, that Cambridge, the second-oldest university in the English speaking world – are getting in on the act.

While British tourists are frequent visitors to Las Vegas, “Cambridge” and “Las Vegas” seldom share the same space in a sentence.

But, in fact, four of the school’s graduate students will spend the next month in downtown Las Vegas studying the casino business at the Plaza, which, at 43 years of age is venerably old by Vegas standards.

Living at the hotel for a month, the students will “focus on identifying ways to capitalize on the Plaza’s extensive renovations and developing strategies to better serve the baby-boomer age group,” a press release about the students said.

Built in 1971, the hotel is currently owned by Tamares Real Estate.

"These students are very talented and have a great business acumen,” said Jonathan Jossel, Tamares’ director of Las Vegas properties. “We believe that they will offer us new ideas and that we can help them better understand the gaming industry."

Student Dugal Bain characterized the symbiotic relationship as a “win-win.”

“We get the opportunity to apply what we've been studying and learn about the casino industry from a great management team,” he said in a news release from the company. “"We hope to provide the Plaza with new ideas about how to cement the Plaza's position as the place to play, stay, relax and eat in downtown Las Vegas.”

Joe Schoenmann doesn’t just cover downtown, he lives and works there. Schoenmann is Greenspun Media Group’s embedded downtown journalist, working from an office in the Emergency Arts building.

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