First Week at Yale Dining

I am now starting the second week of my NACUFS internship at Yale. The first week went by so quickly! In comparison to the other internships across the country, mine seems to be very different. I'll explain as I discuss my first week.

When I first arrived I had to get set up with the Office of Interntaional Students and Scholars, since I'm from Canada. After that I came to the business office for Yale Dining and met the staff and learned about what each person is responsible for, which gave me a better understanding of the complexity of University Foodservice (especially on such a large scale). I also was given a tour of the facilities involved in Yale Dining, from the dining halls in each of the 12 residential colleges, to the retail units that serve grab-&-go foods, to the 3 catering companies located on campus, and everything in between. The next few days I spent getting used to Yale Dining as a whole and learning about how to use Foodservice Suite (FSS), the computer program they use that basically does everything food and dining related. This is the program I am going to be working with for the next 7 weeks. Along with getting comfortable using FSS, I learnt about how to receive invoices from the vendors and how to input recipes into FSS. They also arranged time for me to go on a proper tour of the campus, which was really neat because I learned about the history of the school.

My internship at Yale is directed more towards the nutritional aspect of University Foodservice, which is perfect for me since my background is in nutrition. My major project throughout the 8 weeks is to make sure that all of the recipes are properly linked to the correct nutritional analysis. It's been really interesting to see not only how the food is prepared and served (I got to sit in on a guest lecture for the cooks by celebrity chef Mai Pham!), but also how the entire operation is run, and how many people it takes just to make sure the campus is fed, fed healthily and within budget.

I don't have much more interesting to mention as of yet, since it's still mostly been orientation and getting acquainted, but I'm very excited for what's yet to come!