Happy Volley!

Our first adventure at Penn State began with a volleyball conference of over 3,000 middle school- high school aged girls, along with their parents, called Happy Volley. Our help was a necessity considering the mass amount of hungry people needing to be fed in the dining hall. With a little moral support and much needed coffee, we all forced ourselves to roll out of bed around 4am and be to the dining hall by 4:30 to start preparing for breakfast and for lunch shortly after. This conference lasted three days, and each day we were able to rotate through various positions including, but not limited to: working with the cooks, serving in the front, restocking the salad bar, bussing tables, and even loading and unloading the dishes in the dish room. This experience was the perfect example of how each individual position in a university dining hall plays its own specific (and much needed) role in pulling a large event like that together. We were very fortunate to have the help of other student workers and an abundance of managers all over the dining hall to point us in the right directions and help us out when we needed it the most. Seeing this kitchen and dining hall in action truly demonstrates the magnitude of the foodservice program here at Penn State.