The End of Our Time at Purdue

The eighth and final week for our NACUFS internship here at Purdue. And what did we do for this last week? We did the final touches on our projects, presented them to the management, and I took the ServSafe test and passed. The test wasn’t hard at all. It was the presentation that had me worried.


Amy’s video on sustainability was greatly admired and really well done, even if we had problems with the microphones for the camera. The video goes through the process of how Purdue reduces, reuses, and recycles; everything from the left over food down to the napkins that are recycled.


My presentation was on Sanitation: Food Safety Starts with You! I presented my Wheel of Misfortune and the power point I had developed. I used YouTube videos of ants eating a gecko and the new USDA ads on separating, a cooking song with eighty-six slides, and a germ ball game where everyone had glowing hands. Everyone was very impressed with both our projects. After we were done with our presentations, Mary Ann and Jill Irvin gave us a certificate for completing our NACUFS internship and a lot of goodies to take home with us, including a Purdue cookbook!


Now all that’s left is to pack up and go home. Amy is going back to Boston to enjoy the beach and iced coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts before starting school again in five weeks. Me? I’m going back to the Girl Scout camps in Utah to help them close out their season for the summer. Then I’ll finally go back to Idaho to finish my last year at Idaho State University.

This has been an amazing experience. I’ve done a lot of things in university food service that I probably wouldn’t have been able to do back in Idaho. I’ve gone to Chicago for training, plopped more cookies than most people eat, visited other universities, meet some great people, enjoy water fights and ice cream, deal with the humidity, and realize that this girl form Idaho can do amazing things. I am still numb to realize this internship is over, but it has changed my future forever. So, now as I leave the Indiana plains for the mountains of Idaho, I leave you all with my last thought.


This adventure may have come to an end, but the journey has only begun.