By MARTY LEVINE

Jana Sestili was practically foreordained to come to Pitt.

COMING NEXT

The next Staff Council Coffee and Conversation is with Kevin Conley, associate dean for undergraduate studies, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, at 10 a.m. Sept. 17, at the University Club.

“My dad is a Pitt alum,” Sestili, director of event & conference services for Hospitality@Pitt, told the latest Coffee and Conversation event sponsored by Staff Council. “The night I was born, he was taking a final in the Cathedral of Learning. He just knew he had to take the final and get back. He got back and I was born and … he checked to make sure I had 10 fingers and 10 toes and he looked at my mom and said, ‘She’s going to Pitt.’”

Sestili grew up in Beaver County. Rochester High School, when she was attending, promoted closer, smaller colleges over Pitt — which never sat well with her father. She thought her father, who inspired the family to love Pitt football when she was growing up, “was going to be speechless” when she attended Pitt, interned in Pitt Athletics “and met this big hunk of a lineman named Chris Sestili. … We started dating. I brought him home. We ended up getting married. Thirty-two years later, we’re still here.”

Together, the couple took their first jobs at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where Jana Sestili began working with their alumni association.

“Then Pitt called us home,” she said. “I was in the alumni association for many years and then this thing called Hospitality@Pitt” was formed. “I kept thinking, that’s got my name written all over it. … I love doing the alumni engagement events. I love getting to know alumni, but sometimes you need to change.

“One of my long-term dreams,” she added, “is that we will be able to get a lot of campus departments, if not all campus departments, to come through us to do their events on campus. Because it’s so much easier for us to manage an event for you in the Connolly Ballroom,” for instance, in Alumni Hall.

“If you do it yourself, you’re relying on facilities and housekeeping and catering and all these other departments, and if you’re not on site to make sure that’s all happening, they’re going in a million different directions. They’re busy just like we all are. But if you hire us we’re there from start to finish and we make sure it’s OK. We just hand the pretty baby off to you.”

Asked whether there was a specific space on campus where she would like to be able to host events, but which is currently off limits, Sestili didn’t hesitate:

“There are sacred spaces on this campus and I don’t like when we mess with them. But the most sacred space on this campus is, where? The Commons Room in the Cathedral of Learning. … It should primarily be a student space. But I would love nothing more than to have two weekends in the summer: Let us sell it. We will have the restrictions. We will say you have to keep the furniture in place. We will protect our greatest asset. But do you know how many Pitt alumni would love, and over the years would have loved, to have had an anniversary party or a wedding reception or something along those lines in there? So just two weekends — and it’s a premium spot for us to sell.

“Let’s not kid ourselves about that. We’re not giving it away and it’s not for everybody. But that’s where I would like it to be.”

As for the University Club, which is the new host for Staff Council’s Coffee and Conversation events this year, she said: “I want this to be the place where you call first to do your events. I would like the unwritten rule to be: call first see if your event can go in the University Club. If not, have them help you find the space.”

Asked for advice to others aiming to build helpful contacts throughout Pitt for their own work, Sestili said: “Get out of your comfort zone and get to know other people, people that their title might intimidate you, people that you might not otherwise talk to. Get to know them because you never know when they can help you. … If you form that relationship, it sure is a lot easier” to work together.

She called her leadership style “people-centric. People first and foremost and … collaborative and leaning into making sure that they’re OK and making sure the decisions are OK. Being very protective. I always say, when people bring problems to me, I immediately want to solve them because I don’t want my team to be stressed or anybody in the University to be stressed. But I’ve learned through the years, and I’ve talked to some of my colleagues about this, that if they bring me a problem I’d rather they tell me the problem, give me all the issues, and come up with a solution (themselves). I’d like to empower them.…

“I have had people along the way say that my leadership style might be inhibiting me, professionally — that I’m not serious enough for all that. But you can’t change a zebra’s stripes. So I’ve learned over the years to just be myself but let people know what my value is.”

Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.

 

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