Penn State Weeks 1-3

Hello from Penn State University in beautiful State College, PA. A quick introduction from us:

I am Marie Pesacreta and I am a second year graduate student at The Ohio State University studying medical dietetics. Although my allegiance lies with the Buckeyes, I am loving Penn State!

I am Niki Bruno, and I am a senior dietetics student at Indiana University. Even though I'm a Hoosier at heart, Penn State is really growing on me!

That's us in NYC! But we're getting ahead of ourselves...

There are 4 of us here at Penn State - check out Michelle and Hannah's blog as well!

The first day we arrived, Maria, our internship coordinator, met us at the dorm we are staying at for the summer. What we all first noticed was how welcoming she was: she had stocked our refrigerators with delicious drinks, helped us moved our luggage into our rooms, and was constantly on the phone with maintenance to make sure we had enough pillows, blankets, and could work our AC. It was refreshing to realize right off the bat that we were going to be working for someone who really cared about us.

The first night, Maria treated us to a delicious dinner downtown to get to know each other. Dinner may not be the right term - feast is more appropriate. Between us 5 girls, we housed 3 appetizers, SIX pizzas, and 4 desserts. No shame. Our waitress was awestruck.

Crushed it.

The first week was filled with a lot of orientation type activities, including a ServSafe refresher course, hiring session with Jim Meinecke, and tours of the two dining halls open this summer. Our home base for the summer is the Redifer dining hall, which has both buffet style and retail style dining. We ate lunch with Jim Hopey, the Associate Director of Residential Dining, and Jim Richards, the Director of Residential Dining. We can't help but notice how many Jim's work in this industry...

To get acquainted with the campus, Maria gave us a selfie scavenger hunt to find landmarks around University Park. Hannah's selfie stick was a huge help in this task. Here are some pictures of the whole gang:

At the Lion Shrine, Art Museum, and Penn State wall mural.

Two major conferences were held during our first two weeks working at Redifer. The first conference was Happy Volley, which is a national volleyball tournament for high school girls. This conference was our first weekend working at different stations in the dining hall. We worked in the dish room, in the front of the house serving food, busing tables, and cleaning stations, and assisted the cooks with food preparation.

The second conference was Special Olympics. Again, we worked at various stations in the dining hall, but we mostly focused on serving food. We served around 1,500 people per meal. It was interesting to learn about how the dining hall prepares for such large crowds. Before the guests arrived, we prepared a lot of the food in mass. We assembled and grilled close to 1,000 grilled cheese sandwiches, and grilled about 1,000 chicken breasts.

These are all for me

Unanimously, our favorite part about working at Redifer is working with the Chefs. Not only are they all passionate about the quality of food they produce, they are all eager to teach us anything they can to help us in our future careers. Chef Stefan taught us how to stuff a turkey, which will come in handy come Thanksgiving time. Chef Bern showed us pictures of his cooking competition, and is always checking in on us to see if we need any help. Chef Terry shared his book of making decoration out of food. He also taught us how to make plate garnishes. Chef Mark taught us about the different types of knives, how to use them, and how to make different cuts. Like Maria, all the chefs want to help us get the most out of the internship, as well as help us succeed in our careers.

Apples or real swans? It's hard to tell

Chef Terry ~~afraid I will cut off his finger~~ Need a plate garnish? Call me!

helping me make an apple swan

One of our favorite days was product testing for new snack products that may be purchased at the warehouse for retail sale at the c-stores. The company who ran the show was HT Hackney, a wholesale distributor. Along with purchasing managers from different c-stores, we taste tested about 100 new products. The purchasing mangers were looking to us to get the college kid's perspective. At the end of the day, we each brought home multiple shopping bags full of products not yet being sold at Penn State.

So. Much. Food. This was one of 5 tables

Posing with our favorite products

For our first two day break, we decided to make the four hour drive to the Big Apple. We got in late Saturday night, and stayed until Monday evening. We stayed in Queens and explored Manhattan during the day. The trip was amazing. We will let the pictures speak for themselves: