For some students, the most useful lessons come from restaurant jobs. In kitchens and pubs, they learn time management, discipline, and how to work with others.
For Ethan Hewison, ArtSci ’29, the kitchen has been as much a classroom as a workplace. When he arrived at Queen’s in 2022, he struggled with the familiar first-year challenges of procrastination and a lack of routine. It wasn’t coursework that forced him to hone those skills, but the kitchen at Olivea, an independent Italian restaurant in Kingston, where he began working as a line cook.
At Olivea, Hewison worked the garde-manger station, preparing salads, desserts, and cold appetizers. On a busy night, that meant shucking more than a hundred oysters by hand. According to him, the pace of the kitchen demanded a kind of discipline he hadn’t yet learned at Queen’s.
“The kitchen is organized chaos, and communication is the biggest thing,” Hewison said in an interview with The Journal. “Being thrown into such a chaotic environment forced me to be disciplined.”
Olivea also left room for experimentation. Each night, cooks contributed specials, and Hewison often came up with variations of bruschetta, which gave him a measure of creative freedom alongside the repetition. Precision, however, mattered as much as creativity. “If you put up a salad too early, the dressing seeps in and makes it soggy,” he explained. “Timing is everything, and that applies just as much to assignments and meetings as it does to food.”
The dining room gave Hewison a new perspective on Kingston, too. “Our customer base was really diverse,” he said. “You’d see students on first dates, families celebrating milestones, and older couples. It reflected Kingston as a community, Queen’s wouldn’t be Queen’s without Kingston, and Kingston wouldn’t be Kingston without Queen’s. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”
Now, three years after beginning his degree, Hewison is returning to Queen’s in a new program while taking on a leadership role at Bobby Pecorino’s Italian Wine Bar. “Working in a restaurant has made me a much more disciplined person,” he said. “I think that will really carry into my studies.”
For Kimberly Ramsay, ArtSci ’26, employment at a restaurant has looked a little different. After spending the summer in a chemistry lab, she recently landed a position at Queen’s Pub, the AMS-run restaurant and bar, where she hopes to build connections not typically found in lab jobs, despite their financial benefits.
“Having money is nice, but I also figured it’s a great way to meet people you wouldn’t usually meet and to make friends,” Ramsay said in an interview with The Journal. Though new to the role, she’s already noticed how her on-campus job differs from other work. “You’re working alongside a lot more of your peers, people your own age,” she said. “That changes the dynamic compared to many off-campus jobs.”
Ramsay also acknowledged the financial stress that drives many students to work during their degrees. “The classic stereotype of the broke university student is pretty real,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind being able to go to the grocery store and buy something like $11 grapes without worrying about it.”
Still, she sees the job as more than a paycheck. “Being able to stay calm under pressure and work within a team, it’s not something that’s necessarily taught in class, but it’s something that’s needed everywhere, and it’s something that’s learned on the job,” Ramsay said.
For Hewison, restaurant work carries the same meaning. At its core, the appeal for him is still about the discipline taught, teamwork, communication, and creativity, qualities he applied both in his daily life and his studies.
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income, restaurant, student jobs
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