One of my friends likes to call the freshman housing at Cross Village “the downtown” of campus. At the bottom of a couple of the buildings, you can find restaurants, a coffee shop, and even a grocery store. The dining options in Cross are mostly staffed by students. I talked with my friend who works there, Mikayla Barabasz, to get an idea of what it is like to work for OU Housing and Food.
Mikayla works eighteen hours a week at the restaurants in Cross. These include Credo Kitchen, Glow Kitchen, Milkflower Gelateria, The Hive, and Basic Knead. How often each of these is open depends on how many student staff members are available to work.
“I don’t even know,” Mikayla said when I asked about the restaurants’ hours. “Credo is always open, and Glow…it’s whenever we have workers. It changes every time I go to work. Now I’m used to working at all the places.”
It sometimes gets annoying as a student never knowing what dining options will actually be open, but it seems like it would be worse as an employee. I asked Mikayla what she thought of it.
“At the beginning, it was kind of weird,” she told me. She never knew where she was going to work on any given day.
“But I made friends that way,” she explained. “The people I work with always just talk. There’s never a dull moment.”
Mikayla did not, however, have any experience in food service before coming to college.
“My counselor sent out an email, so I applied for it.”
It pays for her food and housing.
“[It’s] not bad,” she told me. It’s all about trying to balance a routine to make time for homework. Most college students can relate to this.
Overall, Mikayla has had a good experience, and whenever I see her she is making the Cross restaurants a good experience for customers. She always has a smile on her face. She enjoys making others smile too. Milkflower gelato is her favorite place to work of all the restaurants.
“People seem happier when they get gelato. It makes people’s days.”