University of North Dakota - Week 8!

Today was my last day here at University of North Dakota. This week has been really busy between more menu planning, FoodPro training sessions, making recipe adjustments and the Summer Picnic, as well as finishing up projects and assignments before I leave. Rather than go into detail about everything I did this week, I would really like to just thank everyone here at UND for making me feel welcome and part of their team. They gave me a little goodbye reception after my final evaluation, but I feel like it's really everyone here who should be given the applause for all of their hard work everyday. Many thank yous to all of these fabulous people, and everyone not pictured here who I have gotten to meet here at UND...

Part of the great Wilkerson & Squires staff - special thanks to all the ladies in the red shirts for all the hard work they do out in the dining room, especially with the Summer Picnic this week!
Thanks to Linda, the morning kitchen manager, for all of her kindness and help during the internship. (She's hiding in the middle in the pinkish shirt)

Thanks to my very sweet suitemates in room 309, Eun Ji (Angie, left) and Su Jin (Crystal, right), they are dietetic interns here from South Korea!

Many thanks to my internship coordinator Mary Urbanski, for her guidance and encouragement, and also for giving me the freedom to make my NACUFS experience unique!

Thanks to Sarah, who is not only an awesome person but is also the best student manager ever!

Thanks to the evening managers, Lori (the "crazy broad") and Molly (who is just fabulous!) for being their incredibly fantastic selves.
Thanks also to Dan, the morning production manager, he was off today but I got to say goodbye to him at the Summer Picnic. Thank you for everything that you do!

And last but not least, thank you to Dustin the dietitian here at UND, for all of the encouragement, knowledge and support you've given me this summer!

I was really flattered that my reception featured fresh fruit, dip, and healthy snacks instead of the cake they usually have for interns. Here's to healthy eating for all! I hope that that will be my small imprint on UND, through the nutrition education sessions and Stomping Grounds online nutritional projects that I have had the opportunity to work on.

This has been an incredible journey for me, and I will definitely never forget my summer at the University of North Dakota. Thank you to NACUFS, Ms. Debbie Laupp, Mary Urbanski, Dustin and everyone who has made this experience possible for me.

THANK YOU UND!!!

University of North Dakota - Week 7!

Only one more week and my NACUFS internship experience will be over. It is hard to believe that these 7 weeks have gone by so fast.

This week was fairly quiet at UND. Dustin the dietitian was gone most of the week to a FoodPro Conference, and Wilkerson dining hall was closed for service Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for their annual cleaning. This gave me the opportunity to see some areas of UND this week that I hadn't gotten a chance to see much of yet.

On Monday I finished up entering the fall retail menus into FoodPro, along with the Squires dining hall soup rotation. We may have to go back next week and make a few changes, but for the most part I think the menu planning is almost done for fall!

On Tuesday morning, Mary, my internship coordinator, gave me a tour of the Squires dining facility. It is closed for the summer so I hadn't gotten to see it yet, but everyone I have talked to here and in student surveys it has gotten the highest praise of all of their dining facilities, so I wanted to see what it was all about! While I'm sure it looks much different when it is up and running, it is definitely a very nice facility. They remodeled Squires a few years ago, completely changing the layout. It went from having two smaller dining areas on either end of the building with the kitchen in the middle, to having a smaller kitchen on one end with all of the cooking and serving stations in the middle and the dining area on the north end of the building. Because of this, they have some very large windows in some odd places -- like the storage room and part of the kitchen area. They also had to work around several load-bearing pillars in the facility, because the dining hall is on the ground floor and there are dorm rooms up above, the pillars could not be moved. Mary also told me they had to plan the remodel timing-wise around when students would be out of the dorm for the summer in order to run the ducts needed during construction. Even with that, construction went past its deadlines and did not fully open until partway into the fall semester that year.

It was a little bit dark, but I took some pictures inside Squires:

This is the dining area, it had some gorgeous artwork and lighting.

A look back through the serving area. Notice all the pillars?

This middle section is their huge salad bar (soup wells are at the end). Along the back right is their homestyle cooking line (which also has a rotisserie oven), and on the back left is their pizza oven. Their burger bar & grill is off the picture to the right, and a sandwich & panini bar is off the picture to the left. (And more pillars are in the middle!)

I was especially impressed by the very nice dishes Squires has (you can see some in the picture above), though they look a little heavy and difficult to work with. Mary told me they actually had such a huge problem with theft when Squires reopened after the remodel, over 600 glasses were stolen in just the first couple months! They actually bought cheaper / lesser quality glasses to replace them in order to discourage further theft. That's probably not something you would normally consider when redesigning a dining hall -- the dishes and glassware are probably nicer than what the average college student has in their dorm room!

Another impressive feature of Squires is that their hot food lines do not use wells, but instead have heated granite blocks. I can imagine that would make it much easier to clean and maintain the facility, as well as for keeping food temperatures consistent. About the only major drawback of the remodel was that the managers' office at Squires had to be put in the far back corner of the kitchen (such that you have to walk through the entire kitchen to get to it, and you can't see the serving area or dining area from the office). It was very quiet back there! I can see how there would be advantages and disadvantages to having the office secluded like that, however I am partial to the managers' office at Wilkerson which has windows that look out over the entire kitchen and you can even see some of the serving line.

All in all though, I was very impressed by the Squires facility! I can see why students seem to prefer to go there, and their staff is very proud to work there. Hopefully after the Wilkerson remodel next summer, students and staff will be able to enjoy both facilities equally.

I spent the rest of Tuesday working with the Squires kitchen manager, Molly, out at the smaller Terrace dining center. Molly had never worked out there before (since Squires is closed for the summer, she has been working at Wilkerson) and with Wilkerson closed for cleaning, a lot of the Wilkerson staff was also working at Terrace. It was very interesting to see how the staff dealt with being in an unfamiliar kitchen and getting to meet some of the Terrace staff. I got to work at the checkstand for lunch and helped swipe cards and greet diners to the facility. It is a nice little dining hall, although I am a little unsure of why they placed it in the basement of the Memorial Union building -- it seems a little difficult to find there. Another odd feature of the Terrace dining hall is that their specialty bar is enclosed in a little room that is not very noticeable. Although they have signs for it above the doors, unless someone is specifically looking for it, it is not easy to find. They were serving pizza on Tuesday and hardly anyone went in there! I think if they had it to do over, they should make a window or open up the wall to the specialty bar so that the area is more open and visible to the dining area. It is a very nice specialty bar, but if nobody knows it's there, it seems a little silly to have it!

One of the issues I also noticed with having to shift all of the diners to Terrace for those 3 days was some difficulty for students with special diet needs. Dustin being gone for the week probably didn't help matters either, but most of the students who have food allergies and specific diet needs were used to eating at Wilkerson where they have their own cooler with specific foods, and the staff there knows them and is very careful to prepare their foods separately to avoid cross-contamination. On Tuesday Molly helped all the special diet students who came in to ensure that they got a safe lunch and were properly taken care of. However, on Wednesday one of the students with very severe food allergies had a serious allergic reaction at lunchtime. While I wasn't there, Molly told us at the Wednesday staff meeting that the student went very pale and could hardly breathe, and they had to give her an epi-pen and call an ambulance. They are not sure what exactly caused her reaction, as all the food she ate that day should have been safe for her to eat. Unfortunately it sounded like there must have been some cross-contamination when her food was prepared which led to her reaction. It is not something I would have thought of being an issue when moving students from eating at one facility to another, but I think it really shows how hard the Wilkerson staff works to make special diets for students with food allergies so that they can eat safely on campus. Practicing food safety really does go beyond avoiding cross-contamination to avoid pathogens. Cross-contamination can also be immediately life-threatening when food allergies are involved.

Speaking of cross-contamination, my project that I worked on Wednesday and Thursday was to revise the UND Dining Services Sanitation & Safety Manual. Using the ServSafe textbook and the Iowa State University Extension website, I reviewed each policy from handwashing to dishroom procedures. I updated each policy and tried to do some proofreading and make it look a little more professional. I finished revising the 51 page manual by Friday morning!

Dustin came by for a little while on Friday and gave me a couple tasks to do. We will be meeting Monday morning with the Children's Center staff to go over their menu for fall (their food is served out of the Wilkerson complex). I got to go through their menu spreadsheet and put in a few changes, and then I had to run over to the Dining Services admin building to print off copies of it. Next week, Dustin also has someone from FoodPro coming to do several presentations about the program. I've really enjoyed getting to work with it and learn more about foodservice databases, especially in regards to menu planning and nutritional analysis, so it will be interesting to get to learn more!

I spent the rest of my Friday shadowing Lori, Wilkerson's evening manager. She and Molly were both working on writing up action plans for some employees who have been performing below expected standards for their job descriptions. I got to help out a little with making suggestions for actions the employees can take to improve and how to properly word the action plans. I know sometimes there are people who can be difficult to work with and there are also some issues that may be beyond what a manager can address with an employee (for example, if a doctor needs to be involved to evaluate an employee's ability to do a job). It is also difficult for me when some employees are very nice as people, to see that they are not performing all of the tasks of their job and may have to be terminated if they cannot step up. Molly had an interesting take on that, as a manager, you are not paid to be the employees' friend, but to be their boss. Sometimes that can involve making difficult decisions about people who are not performing what needs to be done.

Next week will be my last week here at UND! It will be a busy week with the FoodPro seminars and the Summer Picnic on Wednesday, which I am helping plan. I have truly enjoyed my time here, but I have to admit I am very much looking forward to getting to go home and see my daughter Audre. Only one more week!

University of North Dakota - Week 6!

This week I got to experience a wide variety of things, not only at UND but also at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center here in Grand Forks!

Monday and Tuesday were mainly spent in meetings with the dietitian, lead cooks, kitchen and production managers about the fall menus for each dining hall and each shift. It was interesting to listen to the production concerns about menu planning, mainly having enough labor and time to prepare menu items. Taking their concerns into consideration, Dustin and I had to go back after each meeting and make a few changes to the menus, but overall things were received well. The soup menu for the Squires dining hall was not quite finished before we met with their staff on Tuesday, so we got their input on what they would like to see. Since their facility is not open on the weekends, we had to menu plan for their Mondays to be less labor intensive. As far as the soup menu goes, that generally meant that they could only make one homemade soup on Mondays (they have 2 each day the rest of the week) and that it should be a broth-based soup which is easier to make. Using their suggestions, I was able to plan out the rest of their soup rotation for fall.

On Monday evening, the executive chef, Greg Gefroh, was having a Chef's Table event for about 20-25 residence hall directors and apartment directors, where he did a cooking demonstration and fed them a very nice 5-course meal. I got to do a short presentation at the beginning about the nutrition education lessons I have made for a community nutrition intern to present in residence halls in the fall. I passed out copies of the rough draft of the handout for the first lesson to all of the hall directors there and talked a little about each lesson and asked if they had any feedback about nutrition education topics they'd like to see. I was a bit nervous about standing up and talking, but I think I did okay -- I know they were really all there to eat good food! Hopefully they will promote the education sessions to RAs and help spread the word that nutrition education is available at UND.

On Tuesday afternoon I got to interview several people at the UND Dining Administration office. I've never fully understood the role of administrators, so it was rather eye-opening to see the variety of roles each job fills there. I got to speak with Lola Conley, who does payroll and is involved with hiring and payroll paperwork training for dining services. Interestingly, up until recently she was called on as backup if a dining center was ever short-staffed -- though she told me the only thing she won't do there is cook hot food!

Then I got to interview Orlynn Rosaasen, who is the Director of dining services. His role is more of setting the direction for the department, and getting everyone to buy into its vision and mission. He also has a primary role of negotiating contracts with their primary vendor and with their vending contracts. At UND, all residence hall students are required to have a board plan in the dining halls (but it is optional to live in the residence halls, even for freshmen), and interestingly Orlynn shared that he has had some parents of students get a doctor's note saying their child medically cannot eat in the dining halls. However, after Orlynn pointed out to them that UND has a full-time registered dietitian on staff who can personally arrange any dietary needs with the student, all of the parents have been willing to work with them. It really highlighted for me how important a dietitian's role in college foodservice is, and how the director pulls everything together and solves problems.

I also got to speak with dining services' accountant, Lynette Franks. Lynette's main role is monitoring their board plan rates, and making sure that their expenses are met even though food costs and other factors can be highly variable. I am not a math person so I highly respect the job she does! She also talked about how each dining services unit is treated as a separate account to see how they are faring, but that all of dining services should be working together to achieve the goals of the department, and not trying to compete with each other. I thought it was interesting, I have noticed that there is some competition between dining halls, but didn't think that it would translate to financial competition -- especially when they are required to have their pricing the same across all units.

I also got to stop by the Old Main Marketplace on Tuesday and took some pictures of their Guiding Stars nutritional displays and the nutritional information stickers they have printed on retail salads, yogurts and fruits. Dustin the dietitian here at UND is going to a FoodPro conference out in California next week, and will be doing several presentations about the work he does here at UND. The pictures will be for a presentation he does on nutrition information in retail settings. It was interesting to see some of the information provided, the pita chips and hummus that they sell said on the package that it has 649 calories! I thought that was rather high so I pointed it out to Dustin, and we double-checked the nutritional information for the hummus. Turns out that it was a little higher than it should have been, so we got that fixed.

Wednesday was my day out at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center! I got to spend the day shadowing their chief dietitian, Bonnie Hoverson. Bonnie and everyone of the staff I met there were incredibly nice and showed me around the facility. Just inside the door I was greeted with a huge ChooseMyPlate poster:

Wonder if I could use that for the UND nutrition education sessions?

Throughout the day I got to see different areas of the building. They were originally geared towards micronutrient research, and did a lot of studies on selenium, copper, zinc, etc. Recently, their studies have shifted towards obesity research because of the needs of the country.

In the morning I got to meet with Angie, their main database dietitian who works with their own proprietary software that uses both the USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference and the FNDDS (Food and Nutrient Database). She works with all of their research subjects who have to do dietary recalls, food logs, diet histories, etc. and gets all of that information logged into their database. It was really interesting talking to her about how she got involved in working in research -- it really got me thinking about my future and the possibility of me trying to get involved more in research too.

Then I got a nice little tour of their body measurement lab by their exercise physiologist Bill. They have a lot of equipment similar to the CRC at Ohio State, like a BodPod, a DEXA scanner, and indirect calorimeters. They have a large poster on one wall of the lab showing the DEXA scans of four different individuals all with a BMI of 24.2 -- slightly above normal range -- but the DEXA also determines percent body fat. The percent body fat in these individuals varied from 19% at the lowest to over 40% at the highest, all from the same BMI! It was a really good portrayal of the fact that BMI really does not tell the whole story about a person's body composition. One of the pieces of equipment they had that I hadn't seen before was a very nice bioelectrical impedance machine:

Bioelectrical impedance uses the body's water to conduct a small electrical current. Using the idea that water conducts electricity and fat does not, it then can be used to calculate a person's fat free mass (lean mass) and fat mass. However, BIA can be very difficult to use because so many factors can change the amount of body water in a person (and there really is no "normal" amount of body water for a person). I think I could've talked to Bill all day about the equipment they use there and the advantages, disadvantages and difficulties of each one. Perhaps I should look into exercise physiology instead?

The day I was visiting there, they had a couple of engineers from Minnesota at the facility to speak about smartphone technology and how it can be used for nutrition research. Before lunch I got to sit through a session where one of the engineers spoke about not only smartphone technology, but also about how he can build mobile direct calorimeters and use them rather than relying on indirect calorimetry. There are very few direct calorimeters left because they take so much money to run and a dedicated facility, but the idea that they could be made into mobile facilities was interesting. Most of the rest of the talk was focused on smartphone technology and up and coming developments in nutritional assessment through pictures, accelerometers and other capabilities. Not having a smartphone myself (I know, I must be one of the last people in the world without one!) it was interesting to see how quickly the technology is expanding. In the afternoon I also got to sit in on a chalk talk where the researchers at the facility started discussing research project ideas with the engineers, using the smartphone technologies!

After lunch I got the rest of my tour with Bonnie. I got to see the two kitchens they use there for research studies, and got to peek into a couple of their labs. One of the main studies they are currently doing there is with the US Army, testing diets with different levels of protein and their effect on calcium levels and bone health. They are using a safe calcium isotope to help measure calcium loss in the study participants. Interestingly, Bonnie told me that the calcium isotope is acidic, so they have to use a very small amount mixed in milk to provide it to participants, otherwise it curdles the milk!

On the top floor of the facility, they have a nurse's station and rooms to house up to 14 people (only 13 are currently in use) for live-in research studies. The protein study with the Army is a partial live-in study, meaning that the participants live there but are allowed to leave to go to classes during the day and are on their honor not to eat anything other than what is provided to them through the study. The rooms they stay in are pretty nice!

This one was a spare room that had some extra equipment in it, but each room also has a desk and a bathroom. The bathroom has a refrigerator in it for collecting urine specimens, but there is a separate door for researchers to get things out without having to go into the bathrooms. The study participants can also use common areas while living there, they have a pool table, a piano and a nice reading area among other things. Their normal lounge was converted into a blood draw station for this study though -- not quite like a hotel or resort, but almost!

One of the projects Bonnie is working on right now is to come up with 6 "plates" showing regional Midwestern dishes using the MyPlate concept. She has a lot of cookbooks and recipes, trying to capture different cultures and farming commodities. It sounded like a monumental task to me, hopefully we will get to see the finished product online in the future.

I truly had a great time at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center in Grand Forks, I can't thank Bonnie and her staff enough for letting me spend the day with them and showing me around. Maybe I have a future in research somewhere?

Thursday and Friday this week were back to menu planning and interviews. On Thursday afternoon I got to interview Cindy Spencer, Director of Res Life and Education, and Judy Sargent, the Director of Resident Services. They are both great people to talk to, and it was very interesting to get to learn more about the housing side of services at UND. Cindy is an incredibly caring person who coordinates all of the residence hall staffing and provides guidance and leadership for all of the students who work there. She shared so many stories of things she has seen, that were both sad and touching. She also serves as the person to call in a crisis or emergency in the residence halls, in addition to providing leadership and supervision in her department.

Judy Sargent reminded me a great deal of my advisor back home at Ohio State, the director of the School of Allied Med. Judy talked with me a lot about her role there and the various projects that she oversees, particularly in how they have tried to involve IT in the housing experience at UND and all of the planning that goes into each project. She also shared with me her background in working with non-traditional students in apartment housing and helping them get two playground projects approved and installed. I really appreciated that she was an advocate for non-traditional students finding success in college and in trying to make their living experience a positive one at UND. As a non-traditional student myself, I have seen that returning to college can be a daunting and difficult process where you can feel out of place, and not many administrators seem to stick up for the non-traditional student.

On Friday I got to experience the confusion that is menu planning for all of the retail locations that are served out of the Terrace dining hall, including the Twamley Snack Bar, Airport, and the Med School Food Cart. I got to plan the soup rotation for their fall menu at each location, following the requests of each area but trying to match it with the soups that Terrace is already producing, before entering them all into FoodPro. I definitely have a new appreciation for Dustin's job as a dietitian, I don't know how he keeps all of these menus sorted out!

I only have two more weeks left here in North Dakota, it's hard to believe time has flown by so quickly! I am so thankful to have gotten this opportunity to learn about so many different aspects of college foodservice and the role of a dietitian in this setting. It will be interesting to see what these last two weeks bring!

University of North Dakota - Week 5!

This week has been busy busy busy! I spent the first part of the week continuing my work with Dustin the dietitian here at UND. On Monday I finished up the 4th and final nutrition education lesson plan and powerpoint, entitled "How to Understand a Nutrition Facts Label". The FDA Consumer information page on nutrition facts labels was a huge help in guiding the lesson. I just need to put together the rough draft of the online information sheet for that lesson and I'll be ready to pass on the materials to the marketing department. I can't wait to see the finished product!

Tuesday and Wednesday I spent the day helping Dustin with fall menu planning for the dining halls. They use a 5-week cycle menu every semester. My main project last week was to plan the soup menu for Wilkerson, the main dining center. They serve 2 soups at lunch, extended lunch, dinner, and extended dinner each day. Dustin wanted to incorporate more homemade soups into the menu, and fewer convenience (i.e. Campbell's) soups, to try to provide a better quality product and attempt to reduce the sodium content. The executive chef here at UND, Greg, has been recipe testing a lot of new homemade soups this summer, so I took the list of new homemade soups and went to work trying to implement them in the new menu. The goal was to have 1 homemade soup and 1 convenience soup at every meal. I also had to make sure that there was one vegetarian soup at every meal. While it sounds fairly easy, the process became more complicated when I realized that there were only two vegetarian homemade soup options because the rest were all made with chicken or beef bases. One of the convenience soups, the chicken tortilla soup, is very popular with the students so Dustin wanted to leave it on the menu once a week. It got to be somewhat difficult to pair the chicken tortilla soup with a homemade vegetarian option, but we made it work.

Once the soup menu was planned in a spreadsheet, I had to go back into the FoodPro system and menu the new soups at every meal they were offered. Wilkerson also sends out food to the Children's Center and Facilities here, so it was a bit like being a detective trying to find every meal where soup was being served and making sure it was correctly input into the menu, and old soups were taken out. I also got to change a few of the weekend entrees for the Wilkerson menu, to try to add some non-breakfast items into their brunch menus. They have a great selection of new wraps and casseroles to choose from, hopefully the students will enjoy the changes come fall!

On Wednesday I also got to do the soup menu for the Terrace dining hall, which is smaller than Wilkerson and not open on the weekends, so it was much easier to incorporate choices into. I still have to get those soups entered into FoodPro next week.

The rest of my week was spent doing rotations at the UND Bakery! It was a bit of a different experience working nights and getting to help out making a wide variety of baked goods. On Wednesday night I was mainly shadowing the workers there to see what they do and how they do it. But I did get to help Tracy, the bakery manager, make donut dough. We used a sheeter, almost exactly like this one:
The donut dough goes in just under the red line, through the rollers and down the belt. Each batch of dough was run through 3 or 4 times to get it to the right thickness. Tracy even let me run a batch of dough through. You have to catch it on the backs of your forearms in order to put it back through the roller properly. As the dough gets thinner, it also gets longer and harder to catch!

Once the dough is the right thickness, Tracy used a variety of donut cutters to get the donut shapes we needed. I also got to help roll and twist cinnamon twists, we ran cinnamon rolls through the dough sheeter, and the last of the dough went towards making two loaves of Apple Fritter bread. There was enough dough leftover to make a giant monster apple fritter!

I also got to work with the large deck oven they use in the bakery. It has 6 shelves that rotate around the oven, and each shelf has room for 4 full sheet pans. Both Wednesday and Thursday night we prepared and baked off muffins, cookies, breads, buns, danish, and a variety of other pastries. On Thursday I got to measure out and mix muffin batter for several different kinds of muffins (I'd never used a mixer that big before!) and I got to scoop out and bake off about 4 dozen multigrain blueberry muffins. I think my favorite item in the bakery had to be the pistachio muffins though-- I wish I had taken a picture, they looked so unnaturally green, something like this: (not my picture, but these are pistachio muffins!)

Hulk Muffins!

The other neat part of my bakery experience was that on Thursday night I got to fry off all of the donuts we rolled the dough for on Wednesday. Some of them I also got to fill (like Long Johns) or dip in chocolate, caramel or white icing. We also fried the monster apple fritter we made with the leftover dough. It really took me back to when I used to work nights at a Tim Horton's coffee and bake shop -- though the UND bakery donuts are actually made from scratch and fresh, not frozen and reanimated like Tim Horton's! I think you can definitely tell the difference in quality.

Since the bakery at UND makes all of the baked goods for all of their dining services, we got to load up carts for each area of operation according to what they needed for the day. The carts are then lined up in the inside loading dock of the warehouse so they can be delivered to their respective units first thing in the morning.

While it was a great experience at the bakery, it's been difficult to transition back to being awake during the day! As a dietetics student, it was also somewhat disheartening to see how many unhealthy baked goods options there are out there. I talked to Tracy about that, and he showed me some new healthier recipes they have tested in the past, but didn't have much success with. They do have a lowfat chocolate raspberry brownie that we made, but it has so much added sugar in it to replace the fat that was removed, it's really not that much healthier than the original product. (5lbs of sugar for 4 pans of brownies, oy!) Tracy's take on the topic was that people don't eat baked goods to be healthy, they're intended as treats. While I think that's true, it can also be dangerous. I know there is a temptation to label a food as "healthy" and then many people (myself included!) will over-indulge on the healthy food until they've eaten enough calories to equal the regular version. Apparently they have looked at some multigrain donut options, but the fact that they are all fried in oil and glazed or topped with sugar, the multigrain component really isn't going to improve the nutritional value enough to be worth it. It really drives home the importance of the concept of everything in moderation!

I am really looking forward to next week, not only do I get to continue with menu planning, I will be doing some event planning for an upcoming picnic that UND holds for its retirees every summer. And next Wednesday I get to spend the day at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center here in Grand Forks, shadowing their chief dietitian! Only 3 weeks to go, but so much left to do!

University of North Dakota - Week 4!

This week was fairly quiet, with the 4th of July holiday and several people at UND on vacation. I took advantage of the day off on the 4th and did a little exploring of my own. It was a beautiful day outside, so I went out for a hike at Turtle River State Park, which is about 22 miles west of Grand Forks. I took some pictures along the hike...

I even got to see a what I think was a wild turkey run across the path, with a little baby turkey running along behind it! I took a picture, but it came out pretty blurry...


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!

University of North Dakota - Week 3!

Happy early 4th of July, everyone! Hope you're all enjoying a fun and safe holiday weekend.

This week has been a project week for me. I have been busy working with Dustin the dietitian here at UND to try to finalize the Stomping Grounds coffee project and begin my next project on incorporating portion control education into the dining halls. Rather than boring you with all of the data entry and research I was doing this week, I thought I would give a little sneak peek in on the projects -- with pictures!

The Stomping Grounds coffee shop nutrition information is not live online just yet, but we have a site we have been testing to see what the finished product will look like. Some little things may change, but it should be available to the public soon. Students, staff and faculty will be able to click on a Stomping Grounds link from the UND Dining nutritive menu analysis page and see something like this: (There is some debate over whether we will leave prices listed or not. Do you think it looks better with prices included?)


Then if you were to click on the blue "Nutritive Analysis" button in the middle, this page would come up listing every item available from the coffee shop:


Scrolling down will get you to all of the beverage options available at Stomping Grounds, sorted by Hot and Cold beverages. You can select multiple items on this page to see the nutrition information for an entire meal, or click on an individual item to see the nutrition information and ingredients for that single item. Right now they are sorted alphabetically, and we put the sizes at the end of the name so students can easily compare the difference in calories from one size to the next.


Then, say you have ordered a Blended Cookies and Cream cold drink, and wanted to know how many calories it has. If you click on that link, you'll find out that it has a whopping 959 calories -- the most of any of the drinks offered on their menu!


With Dustin's help, we also had to do some research to confirm which products contain wheat and which do not, for individuals with Celiac Disease or gluten intolerance. Interestingly, the strawberry banana smoothie mix they use contains some wheat ingredients! Not something you would think has wheat in it.

This project was definitely a group effort, with a lot of work done by the Stomping Grounds staff before I got here. My primary job was entering in all of the nutritional information and allergens. There was also some confusion over how to name the drink sizes. Starbucks uses an 8oz cup as their small hot cup, but Stomping Grounds has a 12oz as their smallest size. We went back and forth through all the recipes listing them by oz or sizes multiple times, only to change our minds again and switch back to sizes, but going by the industry standard sizes used by Starbucks (the 12oz hot drinks at Stomping Grounds are now listed as Medium, 16oz is Large, 20oz is Extra Large). Stomping Grounds will likely end up getting 8oz cups in the future so that they truly offer a "small" size. Overall, it feels great to be nearing completion of the project!

My next project will be using the newly released MyPlate portion plate from USDA to incorporate portion control education along with the Guiding Stars program that UND currently uses in their dining halls. I've made some rough drafts of pamphlets, a possible online resource page, and a presentation with a lesson plan to be used for nutrition education programs at the residence halls next year. USDA is sending a CD that will hopefully help us make better graphic displays, and we'll be meeting with the marketing people here at UND to get their help on the project as well. Once it all comes together, I will post some pictures of that project too.

It has been an exciting week, getting to see these projects grow and get closer to being completed. It's amazing how something many people take for granted, like having access to the nutritional information for a particular food, takes so much time and energy from so many people to come together! But hopefully this will serve as a great resource for the UND community and allow people to make healthier choices at the Stomping Grounds coffee shops. And the nutrition education lesson plans, pamphlets and displays I am making will help enable students eating in the dining halls to make informed decisions about the portions of food they select. I am hopeful that somehow MyPlate can be combined with the Guiding Stars cards for each food item, but I'm not sure how feasible that will be. I can't wait to see how the finished projects turn out!

University of North Dakota - Week 2!

It's hard to believe my second week at the University of North Dakota is coming to a close already. I have kept busy this week and made some headway on my first project here. It's felt really good to get work done!

On Monday I got to spend the day working with Gloria at the Wilkerson Dining Center. Gloria does all of the vegetable and salad prep for the entire campus! She is very organized and hardworking, and a great person to talk to. We started the morning by taking temperatures of everything that had been pre-cut over the weekend -- onions, celery, carrots, etc. She logs the temperatures of everything made there, aiming to keep them between 33 and 38 degrees for food safety. Since many of the items she prepares are going out to other dining centers and catering events, it is safer to have the temperatures well below the danger zone because of the transit time. We also prepared several salads *inside* the walk-in cooler to ensure that they stay at safe temperatures. I don't think I've ever seen that much macaroni salad all at once! Once the salads were done, Gloria showed me how to prep celery to be chopped. I wasn't very fast at it, but I got most of a box of celery stalks separated and removed all of the leaves, ends and dirt. I have a definite appreciation of Gloria's job there and how quickly she works! Once the celery was all cleaned and wrapped for chopping on Wednesday, I got to start peeling, coring and washing almost 50lbs of onions. I've prepped a lot of onions in the past in working for Subway, so I was a little faster at that -- and also very thankful that the white onions they use did not make me cry at all! We finished the day by peeling and washing a lot of carrots -- it was actually rather relaxing. I remember peeling carrots with my Mom as a kid and it brought back good memories. Working with Gloria was helpful to see how hard work and organization, sticking to food safety concerns while still taking pride and enjoyment in your work can all come together. She is definitely an integral part of dining services here, and it was great to get to work with her.

I also got to sit in on the final interview for the Utility Manager position on Monday. It was interesting to see that each of the managers still had differing views on who they felt would be best for the positions available, but it ended up working out for the best as each manager chose a different candidate that they would like to hire for their facility. The candidate I liked best was chosen as a backup if either of the others should decline the job offer. It was a really valuable experience to be a part of the interview process and to see how well it is done here at UND. Everyone who was interviewed was given a tour of the dining center and welcomed to the facility, and Mary told each of them the timetable for the process of hiring and when they should expect to be notified. I have interviewed people in the past as a manager myself, but did not have the background or knowledge to really understand the process, how to help interviewees feel at ease, know all the appropriate questions to ask, and the qualities that might make for the best candidate.

Tuesday began my work with the Stomping Grounds coffee shop and trying to get all of the nutritional information for their 150+ coffee recipes entered into the FoodPro program so that it can be made available online for consumers. Dustin the dietitian got me set up at the Stomping Grounds in Memorial Union and I was given a list of all of the recipes to go through. Once I got the hang of entering in each syrup, mix, and sauce used, the process went pretty quickly. The flavored syrups are all from the same company so the ingredients for each one are very similar, I just had to be on the lookout for any allergy concerns like nuts, milk, soy or wheat. The biggest lesson I got from the experience was that small errors in the recipe serving size can make a huge difference in the nutritional information and cost! The 12oz mocha recipe had 0.8lb of chocolate topping listed, which along with an issue with the whipped topping originally put the drink in at over 1000 calories! I'm not sure how you can fit almost a pound of chocolate topping into a 12oz drink, but thankfully we caught the mistake. The whipped topping was also difficult to pinpoint, as the unit used in FoodPro was by the can, and the serving size on the can was 2 Tbsp (6g) -- but there are supposed to be 70 servings in one can. With the help of Stomping Grounds' manager Nancy, we came to the decision that they get about 30 hot drinks' worth of whipped topping out of 1 can. For the blended drinks, they use a lot more whipped topping to fill the dome lid, so I multiplied the 1/30th of a can by 4 to get that amount (0.1333 of a can). That's definitely better than the previous estimate that was in the program which showed the blended drinks as having 20 servings of whipped topping apiece (that's about 30g of fat!). It took me all day Tuesday and Thursday to get all of the recipes entered, and there are still a few loose ends to get taken care of, but most of it is completed. Many thanks to Nancy and the other Stomping Grounds employees who answered my random questions, let me use their computer and root around in their products looking at nutrition labels! It will be great once the project is completely online and people can find out just how many calories there are in the drinks there, and hopefully it will lead to their customers making healthier choices and anyone with food allergies being able to make safe choices.

On Wednesday, Mary and my suitemates from South Korea, Angie and Crystal, and I all went down to Fargo, ND for several great tours. Our first stop was at the Food Services of America (FSA) warehouse. FSA is the main distributor for the University of North Dakota dining services. Their facility was really impressive! They keep the entire warehouse at 45 degrees or below, even dry storage and the receiving docks, because they are constantly receiving products. They also distribute food for all of the Subways in the area, so I saw a great deal of familiar Subway products throughout the warehouse. They use a very helpful bar code scanning system, so that the employee picking a product for a customer must read back the bar code for the item and scan it to ensure that they are picking the correct product. Their shelves go up to 5 stories high, which their forklifts can reach up to! In their smaller, lesser used item area, the forklift has to be operated with a person on the deck -- I don't think I would be comfortable riding a forklift up that high! We also got to step in to the freezer area of the warehouse, which was bone-chillingly cold. I can't imagine having to work for an extended period of time in those temperatures. But our tour guide also mentioned that frozen products are one of the things that food companies are expanding on now, because of the technology we have now and the ability to safely move and keep products frozen for an extended period of time without compromising quality. The other highlight of the tour was getting to see the custom meat cutting and processing area of their facility. We couldn't go inside it because of USDA regulations, but we got to look in. They can make any cut of meat for their customers there, and vacuum package it for delivery. Most impressive for me was that they do all of their meat cutting by hand, they just have a bone saw to make special cuts like T-bone steaks. The facility is closely inspected by the USDA for safety, usually multiple times a week. I never knew that foodservice distributors could have a meat processing facility in their warehouses, but it makes sense how that would save them money, waste less product, and also cater to their customers' specific requests. We each got an FSA tote bag full of goodies at the end of the tour too. It was sad to hear about the flooding in Minot, ND and how it is effecting the people and the warehouse FSA has out there though. My thoughts go out to everyone displaced by the flooding.

We had a yummy lunch on Wednesday at the offices of Roisum Elite, a food broker that works with FSA and customers like UND. They made us a delicious grilled tuna salad and turkey & swiss paninis all with products from food companies that they represent. The broker talked to us about their role in promoting new products to customers and ensuring that distributors like FSA will carry them. Previously, I did not have a very clear idea of what a broker does in the foodservice industry, but they answered all of the questions we had. I was really curious about what kind of role nutrition plays in their industry and whether they see a lot of customers requesting healthier options. It still seems to boil down to the problem of how do food companies make healthier choices more attractive and desirable than all of the junk food options that are out there? I'm not sure what the answer to that is. But it was good to hear that they do see a lot more interest in sustainable products than they used to, and that is something they actively pursue with their suppliers. They also take an active role in ensuring the food safety of the products they represent and knowing where the food comes from in case of a foodbourne illness outbreak. A food broker's job is much more involved than I previously thought! (And they make some really delicious food!)

For our last stop on Wednesday, we got an extensive tour of the North Dakota State University campus dining services. They are moving from having a centralized bakery to having some bakery satellite units, and moving and updating the main bakery facility with newer equipment. We got to see the current bakery they have which has 2 deck ovens that are almost 100 years old! They also have some newer ovens which are big enough to roll an entire cart into -- that is the style of ovens they are going to have in their new bakery facility. The other interesting feature of the NDSU dining services was that each of their sites has student grills, where the students themselves can come and grill any food they want. Our tour guide even admitted that they have found a number of their good student workers by watching the students at their grills. I thought that was a neat concept which helps cater to the students' needs and also can reduce labor costs. Their newest dining facility was built keeping in mind the flow of food, trying to keep it all going in one direction -- from receiving and storage, to cooking, to serving, to the dishroom -- it all appeared to flow very well without backtracking. This is also an important consideration for ensuring food safety. I was very impressed with all of our tours that day, I am truly thankful to have this experience to get to see so many different areas of foodservice that I haven't personally seen before.

Friday morning I got to shift from the enormous FSA warehouse to a shadowing experience at the more modest UND warehouse facility with the warehouse manager Mike Brown. They got in a delivery from FSA first thing in the morning which I got to see and help them check in. Much like I had to do every week as a Subway manager, they have to match up what is listed on the invoice with the products that are actually received. For the delivery I was there, they were missing a package of butter cups that was on the order invoice. It might seem simple and unnecessary, but I know how critical it is to personally check in all food that is received, from both a food safety and a billing standpoint. They receive a lot more food there than I ever did at Subway, but Mike has employees to help him (a luxury I rarely ever had!), and they can simply move the pallets by forklift directly into a cooler or freezer. It was also interesting to see that some of the pallets were not stacked correctly, and a couple of boxes got smashed. Salad mix should never go on the bottom of a heavy stack of boxes of cheese! While the system at the UND warehouse is not as sophisticated as the computerized bar codes at the FSA warehouse, he maintains a very organized and clean facility that is easy to get around, with every section numbered and clearly labeled. I was very impressed with it. Unfortunately, because of the flooding in Minot there were a few items that FSA was not able to send with their delivery. On Friday, this was liquid eggs and beef ravioli. To ensure that Wilkerson would not run out of these products over the weekend, Mike had to call and order them from US Foods' Grand Forks Grocery (GFG) warehouse. I got to go with him to pick it up and deliver it over to Wilkerson. During the school year, Mike said he has to go down there usually a couple times a week to pick up additional products, or things that FSA may only carry on special order (which can take up to 21 days to deliver).

He also tries to stay on top of the needs for each of the units as he places the food orders for them. I got to observe as he placed an order for the A&W unit here on campus. Knowing that he does not keep an extra bag-in-box of diet root beer syrup in the warehouse because it was expiring before it was being used, he called over to the unit to check and see when the box they had was expiring. It turned out the box expired this coming weekend, so Mike knew to go ahead and order a new one. If he had not called, it would have become an issue that he would have had to deal with later. Clearly he knows his job and does it very well! With so many units to keep track of on campus, it was very impressive that he stays on top of things like that. Before I left the warehouse, I got to help him fill 2 orders for units on campus, using the forms and the numbering system they use to locate items in the warehouse. It was not difficult at all to find the cases of juices and water that were on the order form using Mike's system, and we left them ready to go for delivery to where they were needed that afternoon. You really don't need fancy computer systems and complex bar codes when things are well organized and run by people who know what they're doing and take pride in their work, and in doing it right.

I spent most of the remainder of Friday helping Dustin by entering the fall pizza menu for the Squires dining facility into the FoodPro system. His new pizza menu plan is trying to incorporate a wider variety of pizza recipes into the cycle menu. Previously, they had cheese and pepperoni pizza at almost every meal, and now he is expanding that to offer more chicken, steak, vegetarian and other recipes. They also offer lavosh, calzones, and flatbread pizzas. At each meal there is at least one pizza on multigrain crust and one vegetarian option. I also got to try to predict the acceptability factor for some of the new pizzas they are trying, so they have an idea of how much to prepare. I based it off of the acceptability factors for similar pizzas, or generally 9-11% for new meat varieties, and 3-4% for vegetarian options. Their most popular pizza was pepperoni at over 22% acceptability factor! Hopefully Dustin doesn't get much bad feedback for not having pepperoni pizza at every meal in the fall -- but encouraging variety is good, right?

Overall, I am still amazed by the efforts of everyone on this campus, from the warehouse, to the managers, to the cooks, to the servers, to all ensure food safety. This week has expanded that beyond the campus to the distributors and brokers as well. It is comforting to know that everyone in the chain of food distribution and production is equally as concerned about the health and well-being of their consumers. It is also great to see the interest on campus for nutrition as I work on the Stomping Grounds project. College campuses get such a nutritionally bad reputation with the "Freshman 15" (or more) and it is refreshing to see that UND makes so much nutrition information available and is actively seeking ways to promote awareness of the nutrition facts for their dining services. The main reason I chose this school as one of my top choices for the NACUFS internship was because it was possible to focus the internship experience on nutrition and nutrition-related projects. I feel very lucky and thankful to be here and can't wait to see the finished products once I am done with the experience!

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!