Behind the Counter: Pi Staff Hangs in the Balance, Talks Cafe Impact and Workplace Bonds

Picture this: A student running on five hours of sleep drudges into Pi Café in the early morning, stomach churning from the thought of her two exams later that day. Her gloomy attitude commands her to run in and out, grab a coffee and a bagel for substance, then return to studying. But from behind the counter, the student hears a familiar voice joking, “What can I get for you today, a beer?” It’s followed quickly by “Anything for you, honey,” from long-time Pi employee Miguel Rosa. Suddenly, the day does not look so bleak.

This scene is familiar to any University student, coffee connoisseur, or casual cafe-goer. Students go to Pi for more than food: It’s the community and spirit that keep Pi’s line stretching well beyond its doors into Exley. 

Each table of the cafe is routinely filled with students socializing, listening to music, and perhaps even completing the work they set out to do. This atmosphere is especially championed by two long-serving employees of Pi Café: Rosa and Laura Goldner.

Goldner and Rosa, alongside other Pi staff, recently encountered a rumor that the cafe was to be closed, its employees’ positions called into question, and the space filled with vending machines. Following the initial confusion, it became apparent that the University planned on moving the cafe into a new eatery in the New Science Building. University President Michael Roth ’78 affirmed in an interview with The Argus that Pi Café’s existence was not in question.

“[Pi Café] will be in the New Science Building; it’ll be bigger and better,” Roth said, adding that future employment for staff was not in doubt. “We may need more workers. We won’t need less.”

However, while final plans are being made by the Wesleyan Student Assembly and the University’s dining team, Pi staff are unconvinced that the changes will preserve the cafe, its current staffing, and its community as it is.

Both Goldner and Rosa have worked jobs around the University campus dining operations for over 30 years, spending time in WesShop, Usdan, and the University’s former dining hall, McConaughy Hall (MoCon) and working odd jobs around campus during overtime shifts. 

“I had just had my baby, my first daughter, and my other job that I had didn’t want me to work part-time anymore,” Goldner said. “My mother worked here [at Wesleyan] many years ago, so I took this so I was able to stay home with my daughter. As time went on, I just really enjoyed working with the students. Money was pretty good, and my summer is off, so I can be with my kids. This job really led me to not ever have to put my kids in daycare, which was huge.”

Despite their long history working around campus, Goldner and Rosa agree that Pi Café is their undisputed favorite workplace at the University. 

“We [the employees at Pi Café] are like a small little family, even [Bon Appetit Food Service Director] Gary [Kriksciun],” Goldner said. “He’s our manager, but it’s just different because there are not a ton of people that he has to manage. I think we engage more on a personal level.”

This familiarity between workers, managers, and baristas alike is what Goldner and Rosa cite as the appeal of Pi Café and the motivation behind their continued interest in working at the University. This relationship extends beyond the adult workers to the student employees at the cafe. 

“Sometimes we have more of a motherly relationship, sometimes they’ll [student workers] ask me for advice, and sometimes it’s just a friendship that we’ve developed,” Goldner said. “It’s such a huge age difference, but sometimes after they graduate from here, and they’ve been out of Wesleyan for a while, it’s more, it can be more of a friendship.”

Ava Samson ’26, a barista at Pi, echoed the familial sentiment. Having worked at the cafe since the beginning of her sophomore year, Samson said that forming relationships between the employees has been an integral part of her experience at the University.

“My favorite part of the job has to be the amount of people you meet and the great relationships you make there,” Samson said. “Laura, Miguel, Gary, they’ve become like family to me. And then the other student workers you meet, I’ve made some really great friends just from getting put on random shifts with them. Everyone there [at Pi] just treats you with such respect, care, and love. All the students support each other, and we’re always just having fun back there.”

Goldner discussed one particularly impactful relationship with a former student and barista at Pi, Nellie Ghosheh ’23. 

“I worked with her [Ghosheh] for three years,” Goldner said. “We have just developed such a close relationship. I went out to see her in New York just a couple weeks ago, and we spent the day together. Then she was here, and she had surgery and stayed at my house for a couple nights. I miss her like crazy. She always teases me that I’m going [to go] to her wedding someday.”

According to Pi’s employees, the working environment at the cafe is one that supports personal freedom and a constant flow of humor and hijinks.

“One day, Nellie played a joke on Gary,” Goldner said. “She had gone downtown that day, and she was telling Gary about a really good dessert she got. She took a puck of espresso that looked like a really decadent dessert, put chocolate sauce and whipped cream over it, and she told him [Kriksciun] to try it. It was so hilarious, but he was such a good sport.”

Samson spoke to one of her own slightly embarrassing, yet good-humored, experiences at Pi. 

“I played Survivor last semester for a student forum class,” Samson said. “One of the challenges to get an advantage in the game was to break a social norm. So I actually ended up singing opera as loudly as I could while I was handing a drink out at Pi. Laura has never stopped talking about it since.”

Pi’s employees work to extend the sense of community and familiarity fostered in Pi’s corner of Exley to the broader student population.

“My favorite part of the job is harassing students in the morning,” Rosa said. “I have known everyone for so long, so I just love making jokes with them [students] and making them happy.”

Goldner further described the development of the community at the Café.

“There’s definitely a community with the students every morning,” Goldner said. “There’s sports teams that come to eat breakfast at Pi, and it’s been like that for the entire time I have been working there. Last year, the soccer team and the volleyball team would put some tables together, and they would all have breakfast together every morning. It was just so cool to see how their friendships developed from freshman year to senior year.”

Amelie Zosa ’29, a regular at Pi, spends her afternoons studying with friends at the cafe, a spot that she cites as one of her absolute favorites on campus. According to Zosa, the communal atmosphere that Pi’s employees foster is the driving force that makes the cafe so special.

“I just love how Pi brings the Wesleyan community together,” Zosa said. “Seeing familiar faces behind the counter and making conversation with Pi employees and regulars truly always brightens my day.”

According to Goldner and Rosa, getting to know a familiar batch of regulars and being widely appreciated across campus is yet another significant perk of working at Pi.

“It means the world to both of us, and we feel the same about you guys,” Goldner said. “We really do. We love seeing you every morning, joking with you, and hearing how your weekend was. It’s truly special.”

When asked about his popularity, Rosa spoke of his frequent appearances on the University social media groups, such as the app Fizz, where students regularly post their appreciation for him.

“Miguel told me to have a wonderful day, so I am going to have a wonderful day,” an anonymous user said.

Messages like this one are not uncommon, making Rosa a Fizz celebrity. 

However, the attention around Pi has not been entirely positive recently. On Monday, Feb. 9, the Pi staff learned of developing plans to close the cafe and replace the space with automated vending machine-style dining. 

“We’re both very upset about it, on all levels, but especially with the fact that we’re not going to be seeing you guys on a regular basis,” Goldner said. “We’re not going to be in the same atmosphere that Pi has. It’s going to be different even if we do go to the new building, and we don’t know whether we will, but it may not be a place where we can joke with you and talk with you like we do here.”

Despite their decades-long loyalty to the University’s dining services, Goldner and Rosa were only notified of the closure by accident when measurements were being taken for the new vending machines. According to Goldner, if this slip-up had not happened, they would have learned about it when returning to campus in August at their annual team meeting.

“[After] being here for 32 years, they [the University] should have had more decency with their employees,” Rosa said. “They should have met with the employees and said, ‘Listen, we have these plans that are not concrete, but we’re going to plan to take this [Pi Café] over there [the new science building].’”

In response to the closure, Samson felt the need to take action, creating the Instagram account @save.picafe, which has garnered 1,234 followers as of Monday, March 2, 2026. 

“The reason I started the Save Pi Instagram was because I was working a shift the day after Laura found out, and we were all really upset and just brainstorming ‘What can we do?’” Samson said. “I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to make an Instagram right now, and I feel like we can get a lot of student body support around this.’” 

The account has worked with the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) to provide information about Pi’s alleged closing and created a petition with over 430 signatures to compel the University to keep Pi open. They have additionally drafted an email template to send to President Michael Roth ’78 and the University dining services, in which students can share personal messages about the value of Pi. 

“I do think it’s made an impact,” Samson said. “I wish, honestly, that it could have made more of an impact, because I myself haven’t heard back from many emails that I’ve sent to various people. But I do think that the power of the student body and their outrage is definitely being harnessed. The WSA has reached out to us, and since then, we’ve had a meeting that has outlined how the current workers of Pi can help form the new cafe. And I think that that probably wouldn’t have happened without as much student outrage as there was because of the poor communication. I would definitely say that that’s the biggest step towards the progress we’ve made. But I still think that there’s a lot to be done.”

While Goldner and Rosa are eager to stay within the Pi community, they are cautious in approaching the future of their jobs at the cafe.

“We are just gonna see where we can go,” Goldner said. “It’s all based on seniority, so whether we are able to move to the new cafe or not remains to be seen. We don’t even know jobs are available there or the hours available, so we’re really not sure where we’re gonna end up yet.”

According to Rosa, it is not uncommon for University employees to shuffle around jobs without warning.  

“We’re already used to stuff like this because MoCon closed when I was working there, so I moved to WesShop, back to where I used to be,” Rosa said. “If they close Pi, people from Summerfields can sign onto it, people from Usdan can sign onto it. Because they have more seniority, they can get those jobs before us. So we will have to bump out somebody that used to do our new job.”

Samson offered advice to students still feeling eager to continue to make a change in Pi’s fate and to improve transparency within the University’s policies.

“Honestly, I feel like at Wesleyan, student movements can sometimes die pretty quickly, so I think that our spark has almost been lost a little bit,” Samson said. “I definitely want to get that spark back: Sign the petition, keep sending the emails, and hopefully just push and push and the people who are in charge to keep Pi where it is now, because even if Pi does move to the new building, we might not have the same employees that we love to see every day.”

Leah Ziskin can be reached at lziskin@wesleyan.edu.