University of North Dakota - Week 1!

My first week at University of North Dakota has already been a fantastic learning experience! I arrived last Sunday and my internship coordinator, Mary, took me on a quick tour around campus and the town of Grand Forks. It is beautiful here and I have been enjoying the outdoors by walking around as much as possible.

On Monday I began with my internship orientation and expectations, and Mary took me around to all of the dining services locations on campus, the administration building and the warehouse, and I met so many people. Everyone has been incredibly nice, and I am trying to learn names as I go. In the afternoon I got my first taste of Wilkerson (the main dining facility during summer), working with Linda and getting a tour of the kitchen with the lead cook Mara. I got to pan up a box of frozen salmon for dinner, add lemon pepper seasoning and bake it to the proper temperature. I am very impressed with all of the food safety standards here at UND that everyone uses to ensure safe food is being served. I got to help take temperatures in the deli unit, and helped out with the grill station during dinner, where they also take temps for each piece of meat they cook. They go through a lot of hamburgers and cheeseburgers! There are also a couple of girls here for the summer who have very severe food allergies, and the dining services staff, including their dietitian Dustin, have gone out of their way to accommodate these girls to make sure they can eat safely. One of the girls took the wrong milk out of their special diet cooler for her breakfast cereal and had a pretty severe allergic reaction. The staff responded by moving things around so that she could have her very own special diet cooler with only items she can safely eat, and they have her fruit and salads specially prepared separately. As a dietetics student, I thought this was a great learning experience on how to properly handle a food allergy situation.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I got to shadow Dan, Wilkerson's Kitchen Manager. They had already counted all of their inventory on Monday, and Tuesday morning I got to observe Dan finishing up entering it into the FoodPro software they use. Shadowing Dan over those two days gave me an immense appreciation for the job he does there. While handling inventory and forecasting the dining center's needs for the next week, he had to deal with a wide variety of little problems that would come up. On Tuesday, an entire cart from the bakery did not show up, so substitutions had to be made for the wheat rolls and banana bars that they did not receive. For other items that they were short on, Dan would have to make a call over to the warehouse to see if it could be sent over, in addition to things he already knew they would need for the following day. He also handled a situation where a student's ID card that was reported stolen was used to purchase items at the Wilkerson C-store, and had to call in the police to watch the surveillance video to try to identify the thieves.

On Wednesday, Dan had to put in work orders for a broken CombiOven switch, a leaking cooler and other mechanical issues in the kitchen to get them fixed. He's also a member of the Staff Senate, so I went with him to a Legislative Committee meeting where they were discussing the issue of increasing employees' dependent sick leave from 40 hours to 80 hours. I never considered that a Kitchen Manager would be interested in how dependent sick leave policies would effect his kitchen and his employees, so I found that to be very eye-opening. No matter what was thrown at him, Dan handled every situation and did not lose his cool. It was an incredible learning experience for me to see not only all of the many hats he wears and how he handles each job, but to get some insight as to how their FoodPro system works and how they can prepare for meals in advance. Forecasting counts of about how many people will be at each meal, and using that to order what they need from the warehouse on a given day is an interesting process that has to stay in sync to work. Clearly a Kitchen Manager needs to be able to work on their toes, keep a level head, and also have in depth knowledge of the kitchen to be able to handle anything that might come their way. The two days I spent shadowing Dan were a great way to get oriented to all of the aspects of the kitchen and foodservice management.

Thursday was mainly an organizational day for me, as I got my ID number and was able to get a UND ID card, and internet access! I did get to participate in interviews for two utility manager positions that they are hiring for. I have interviewed employees in the past as a Subway store manager, but it was very helpful to me to see the care that they take in interviewing at UND. I got to ask some questions during each interview, and put in my input at the end as to who I felt the best candidate was. It was also interesting that not all of the managers agreed on who was the best candidate. There will be one more interview on Monday before they make a decision on who to hire. I found it very valuable that I was included in the process and hopefully I will get to see the outcome while I am here as to who gets the jobs and how well they perform! To finish my day on Thursday, I got to go with Sarah, a student manager, to make a delivery to the UND Wellness Center. We supplied the ingredients for root beer floats for a small event there. Before we left, Sarah kindly sponsored me to get a membership to the Wellness Center and one of their employees took us on a tour. It is a really nice facility, and I have been making good use of it since then! I need to work on my muscles, carrying a tray of 2-liters was not as easy as I thought it would be.

Friday was my first day working with Dustin, the dietitian here at UND. He has a genuine passion for his work here, and it really shows! He gave me a crash course in FoodPro that morning, specifically for the project I will be doing for the campus coffee shop, Stomping Grounds. I will be doing nutrient analysis for every coffee recipe they currently sell, and entering the information into FoodPro so that anyone can access the nutrition information online. I am really excited to get working on this project, and I hope it will be a great help for students on campus looking to practice good nutrition. The main issue is that a lot of the syrups they use in their beverages do not have nutritional information in the ESHA nutrient database that FoodPro links to, so I will have to get it off of the packages at the coffee shop or find it online. On Monday I met the manager of the Stomping Grounds location and two girls who are working on inputting the ingredients for each recipe into FoodPro. Hopefully I will get to work on that more next week and make significant headway on the project.

Dustin also wears many hats here at UND and I got a small idea of everything he does here. We stopped at the administration office and met with Lynette and Cindy there about billing for external food orders to the child care and Head Start programs here. Apparently a couple of small invoice errors have led to the programs being charged less than they should have been for the food they were receiving. They are also doing a major physical inventory count at the warehouse here on Monday, so Dustin had to help the warehouse manager Mike close out the week and print out all of the needed inventory count sheets. In between that, we walked over to the Old Main Marketplace dining area to see a demonstration for a new piece of equipment they bought to cook gyro meat for Mediterranean-themed cuisine. I've never seen a meat cone be cooked before! The equipment used to cook it is a stand up broiler, which looks similar to a rotisserie except that the meat stands up vertically and the outer layer is shaved off as it cooks. Dustin coordinated having a mechanical engineer come by to check the equipment to ensure it was safely underneath the fume hood, and had a health inspector come by to go over any concerns about the product's food safety. They had to grill off the meat after it was shaved to ensure that it reached the proper temperature. It was crazy to see how much grease cooked out of the product! The nutritional information for the gyro meat was definitely not the healthiest (31g fat, 720mg sodium in a 3.5oz portion!), but it was interesting to see how offering a variety of products can be done to try to please all customers. My take home message from the experience was that even though something may not be appealing to me personally, it is still worth trying because the goal is to cater to the customer and their needs and wants. Thankfully Dustin is adamant that they will have several healthier options to serve along with the gyros in the fall. And again, the entire staff's time and concern given to food safety and making sure the product was cooked to the correct internal temperature was very impressive. This campus is all about food safety!

Altogether, this has been a great first week here at UND, and I am eager to dig in and get to work next week. One of my greatest weaknesses is that I tend to be very quiet and can have difficulty speaking up and asking questions. I am trying very hard to ask as many questions as I can so I can learn even more while I am here. But I have observed how being quiet can also be a good trait -- just in watching Dan work compared to some of the other managers at Wilkerson who tend to be more talkative, Dan gets so much more work done and can be far more productive when there aren't non-work related distractions going on. In the past, I have always thought that being more of a "people person" is an important asset for a manager to have, but in some situations it may actually be detrimental as work can turn into social hour, and less work actually gets done. Now I can see that the most effective manager strives to balance positive interactions with employees, handling problems, and getting work done as efficiently as possible, and does not need to be everyone's best friend or be spreading gossip to do well. I can also see how some people play off of others and may not work well together, and how that can also decrease productivity. Human interactions are far more of a concern in management positions than I considered before, and being able to handle all manner of people in every situation with class and respect is a key trait for a good manager. I hope I can learn more while I am here about how to go about putting those ideas into practice!