Brewing business: A Wharton undergrad who manages Penn’s student-run café
How third-year Wharton undergrad Olivia Turman finds community, leadership, and clarity through Williams Café.
2 min. read
In the back of Williams Hall’s ground floor is Williams Café, better known as Wilcaf. Third-year Wharton student Olivia Turman spends her shift training new baristas and keeping track of inventory to ensure the café is stocked for the next day. 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 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.
Turman 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,” she says. “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 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.”
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.
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