It really would have been a perfect hike, except I made the grave mistake of not bringing any mosquito repellent. Word to the wise: in the summer, mosquitoes in North Dakota are mean! This gorgeous firefly, on the other hand, kindly posed for me to take its picture...
All in all, it made for a lovely 4th of July. On another weekend before I leave North Dakota I'd like to take a trip out to another state park, but this time I will take mosquito repellent with me!
On Tuesday it was back to work, and I got to sit on a couple of meetings with Mary, the assistant director of dining here at UND and my internship coordinator. The first meeting was a Dining Services Monthly Update meeting. Each area of dining services was addressed and got to talk about how their summer was going. It has been fairly quiet here this summer, unfortunately there have not been many catering events and camp enrollment was down from last year, which is where dining services gets a lot of their revenue from in the summer. But housing enrollment is up for the fall, so much so that they are having trouble finding rooms for everyone! They also discussed issues with trying to get new student employees trained before all of the new students get here. But new work-study students are not allowed to begin working until classes begin (returning students are allowed to work). As a work-study student myself, I identified with this issue and how it can be difficult to pick up a new job at one of the busiest times of the year, when students are coming back to school, and the staffing issues that go along with training so many new employees. To solve the issue, they decided to try to post a job listing indicating that the job won't start until August when classes begin. Not the best solution, but hopefully it will work out for the best.
The second meeting on Tuesday was for planning the NACUFS regional conference that will be here in Grand Forks in February. While they're still in the preliminary stages of planning, sorting out costs and facilities where it will be held, it was interesting to me to see just how much has to be planned for with an event that size. At the meeting they were looking at different planner-type notebooks or binders which they could give away at the conference with schedules and other information in them. They were having some difficulty finding a nice, professional-looking binder that was affordable, in part because so many things today are just put online or on a phone, many people don't use pen and paper very often! It's hard to imagine, but at some point in the future most paper will probably be completely phased out in favor of electronic media. (Like this blog!)
For the remainder of the week I have been busy doing more research and writing lesson plans for nutrition education sessions they are planning to have another intern do in the fall. I decided to make a powerpoint presentation to go along with each lesson plan, so I have been constructing those together. Once the lesson is complete, I go back and make a pamphlet based on the lesson that could also be distributed to anyone interested in the dining halls. So far, I have mostly completed the first 3 lessons. The first lesson is "Build a Healthy Meal with MyPlate", based on the new USDA MyPlate symbol and the beneficial health messages it conveys. The second lesson is "Take Control of Your Portions" about basic portion size measurement, and how portions have gotten out of control in the last 20-30 years. The third lesson joins together the Guiding Stars program that they already use here at UND with MyPlate, and it's probably my favorite so far because the two concepts fit together so well. The fourth lesson will be on Nutrition Facts label reading.
Dustin and I met up with Kirsten from the marketing department on Friday, and showed her the rough drafts of the pamphlets that I've put together. They will be making them look much nicer and more professional once I'm done! She also expressed an interest in using the pamphlets to send out nutrition information via monthly email newsletters to all students through a program they use called Constant Contact. Additionally, I will be making condensed versions of the handouts to put online for any student to access them there. Bearing in mind that I am not a graphics designer and I've only been using Word and Paint to put these together, here's a peek at the rough draft of the online fact sheet I made for the third lesson (using Guiding Stars with MyPlate):
I'm sure the marketing people here will make it look much more professional, but I'm fairly happy with how it looks so far! Hopefully the students here at UND will get good use out of the information I'm putting together.
It's hard to believe half of my NACUFS internship experience is already over! It feels like there is so much more I want to do here, but I have already gotten to do so much. I can't wait to see what comes next!
No comments:
Post a Comment