Even as a kid, Christen Joy Smith would tote her own crayons around. She couldn’t count on restaurants to provide quality crayons or have enough colors to deliver on her creative vision.
“That’s how serious I was,” she says, “and I do have perfectionism tendencies so I remember even as a little kid I needed it to be perfect, all my shapes and everything.”
Soon, she was winning restaurant coloring contests and taking art classes at Red Rock Canyon Visitor Center. When her mother’s friend began making handmade greeting cards, Smith followed suit. Her custom cards often feature pets and places special to her, like Hospitality Hall, which is featured on thank-you cards she hands out to faculty and students.
“Art for me is also a way of therapy; it can be my form of therapy.”
So after the Dec. 6 campus shooting, she pulled out her Pentel Pointliner pens and colored pencils to draw Beam Hall emblazoned with a “UNLV Strong” banner on the face of the building. “I drew that the day after it happened, and it was very healing for me.”
Megan Neri, a director of communications, spotted the image on Smith’s Instagram. "When I saw Christen's artwork shortly after the tragedy, I was inspired by the hopeful colors and knew it would be meaningful to our UNLV community," said Neri, who printed it on the thank-you cards that the Lee Business School sent to donors and supporters.
The greeting cards have lit an entrepreneurial spark for Smith. “Recently I did an internship in Montana at a fly fishing lodge and I made souvenirs for the guests. I would draw fish on greeting cards of all the fish that they could catch and just give them out.”
She has added minors in marketing and global entrepreneurship to her hospitality management major.
“As a little kid, I loved to cook for my parents, that’s how I fell in love with hospitality,” she says. “It was a joy for me to be of service.”
After attending her first American Marketing Association (AMA) meeting, she joined its Collegiate Case Competition team and headed to Chicago, where the team took third at a national competition. She was offered an officer position with UNLV's AMA chapter and eventually became its president.
But, she didn't stop there. Smith is also an ambassador for stationary company Pentel; marketing director for the Books, Beverages, and Bites student club; and vice president of the Honors College Student Council.
For UNLV’s Troesh Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, she’s led workshops on goal setting through journaling, including as a TEDxUNLV speaker.
And now she’s diving into a new venture, having won a $15,000 award with her partners from the 2023 President’s Innovation Challenge. They are developing their app YouChef, which allows users to come up with recipes based on what ingredients the users already have on hand in order to reduce food waste.
After she graduates, Smith hopes to attend the William S. Boyd School of Law and work in hospitality law. She believes that will set her up for eventual success with her own business.
Her many student roles may seem overwhelming to some, but for Smith, the balancing act comes naturally. “I like being creative and thinking of different ideas,” she says, “and I have this vision for myself and who I am in the future, and I want to resemble that success now.”
