Real World Experience in a Contained Environment

I am an AACPS: Employee–Manager, Café @ Maryland Hall

When I first saw the job posting for Manager at the Café at Maryland Hall, I was drawn to the way it was grounded in the local community. The Culinary students at the Center of Applied Technology (CAT) South prepare the food and staff the café, coffee is provided locally by the Chesapeake Bay Roasting Company and we host performances from local musicians and showcase artwork from students involved in the Performing & Visual Arts program and Maryland Hall. I love being involved in the community, but my favorite part of the job has been working with the students.

As Manger, my primary responsibility is to supervise and train the students who work here. This year we’ve had 18 students working in the café, either as students (who volunteer during one of their periods at CAT-South) or paid student interns (who help run the café after school and on weekends). I love working with these students and it’s been really fun to see their growth from the beginning of the year. We have some students who are a little shy when they first start, but now they are building relationships with the regular customers that are coming in. They know their names, they know what they order. As a business, you want your employees to be building relationships because that keeps people coming back, but we also want young adults who to know how to work with other people and I get to see them become more comfortable and more confident.

The Café gives students real world experience in a contained environment. The students are thinking when they are here and if there’s a problem, we all work together to think about how we can solve it. People learn by doing, but often that means not doing things right the first time. In the Café, we can allow students to work through mistakes in a way they wouldn’t get in a regular professional environment. As a result, these students are really taking ownership of the product and of the business.

I remember when we were trying to figure out the best way to manage inventory for the café. Working with Chef Pam Klink at CAT-South, we decided that the student who put the inventory list together at the end of the day would be responsible for bringing the food the next day when he or she left CAT-South. On the first day we were going to try the new system out, the student who was supposed to pick up the inventory wasn’t able to come to school. He reached out to me to see if he could ask the other students in the class who would be working that day to take the lead on getting the inventory to the Café. I was so excited because this is exactly what we want—students who are able to trouble shoot, be intuitive, and think ahead to ask themselves “what can I do to make sure the café is okay when I’m not there?” It’s been very cool for me to see these students coming up with the solutions on their own. We’re just providing them the space to practice.

The Café just celebrated its first anniversary. As I think about how we can grow as a business I would love to have more people come by and see what we’re about, but I also want to make sure that education is at the forefront. When I took this job it was very important to me that success for Café is really the students’ success and that can look different for each student or intern. It’s definitely a challenge to navigate this line of being a business and a learning environment, but it’s been awesome to see students succeeding.