In the back of Williams Hall’s ground floor, behind staircases that lead to deep hallways of classrooms, adjacent to a silent lounge where students write essays in foreign languages for said classes, a sign announces the Drink of the Week. The drink changes and is often relevant to Philadelphia, like the “Fly Eagles Chai!” during Super Bowl week. In the seating areas by the counter, students gossip, meet with professors, and wait for their shifts to begin. The baristas are deft, bouncing between taking orders and serving customers.
At around 4 p.m., Olivia Turman (W’26) springs into action, training new baristas and keeping track of inventory to ensure the café is stocked for the next day. Williams Café, better known as Wilcaf, is part of Penn Student Agencies, a set of student-run organizations that provide services to students from photography to laundry to water delivery. Every role, from the CEO of Penn Student Agencies (PSA) to the baristas, are students who balance their shifts and duties with their courses.
Olivia began as a barista at Wilcaf, making drinks and food items. She then transitioned into supervising the catering program, ensuring that events around campus were supplied with coffee and bagels. As operations manager this year, Olivia is responsible for the café’s backend operations.
“Day to day, I do our inventory and stocking,” Olivia explained. “Every Wednesday, I come in, put away our deliveries, and then count to see what we have and calculate our rates of utilization.”
Olivia is from a small town in West Virginia called Barboursville, a tight-knit community.
“It’s the kind of place where you still help your neighbors,” she said. “When I was looking at colleges, I was looking for places where I felt like I could find a similar sense of community.”
Beyond that, because so much of Barboursville is small businesses, she found specific power in the ways that they can play a significant role in bringing people together in a community. For her, Wilcaf serves to honor her upbringing and helps create and strengthen the communities that she applied to Penn for.
“Yes, we’re just a café on campus,” she admitted. “But for a lot of people, we’re their study spot or we’re the smiling face in the morning when they need their cup of coffee or their bagel.”
The junior is concentrating in management with a specialization in organizational effectiveness, so a significant amount of her work is not only relevant but also an application of her educational focus on leadership and management. One of the courses she’s currently taking, Management 2380: Organizational Behavior, has been directly valuable for leading as a cafe manager.
“Learning a lot about the best way to do a performance review is super helpful,” the West Virginia native said.
While performance reviews may seem like something most Wharton students only worry about after graduating, student workers at PSA do yearly performance evaluations.
“I’ve been able to go back and directly apply it when we’re writing the policies for these performance reviews.”
Beyond that, she uses skills from her finance and accounting Business Fundamentals courses when looking at the budget and accounting books. The case-study style of her coursework, ranging from Management 3010: Teamwork and Interpersonal Influence to Marketing 2110: Consumer Behavior, has allowed her to apply lessons from real-world challenges companies have faced to Wilcaf and PSA’s operations.
“We’re learning about different pricing and marketing strategies and where certain companies went wrong, so we’re not making the same mistakes,” she said about her consumer behavior course. “It’s very helpful to see how companies came out of certain problems so that we can gauge accordingly.”
Another way that she’s learned about the applicability of her pre-professional and academic pursuits is through the alumni network—during Penn’s Homecoming weekend last year, PSA alumni came back for a reunion that was, of course, catered by Wilcaf. As she talked to the people who had gone through Penn Student Agencies, she understood how the skills she’s gained directly apply to the professional world.
Next year, she’ll be moving on to a role as the COO of Penn Student Agencies. Having mastered Wilcaf’s operations, she looks forward to understanding the different agencies better and strengthening the community between them.
As for her continued goals as a barista? She’s in the process of learning latte foam art. A leaf is the easiest for her, but she says a heart is the coolest.
—Alex Zhou, C’25, W’25
Posted: April 22, 2025
