Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Week 3 at Illinois State University

This week was packed full of our favorite thing….MEETINGS!!! I’ll spare you the details and just let you know that they were super productive and educational. Dianne really has me focusing on the dynamic of the meeting and the team. Everyone contributes something else to the conversation and it’s great to see the problem solving and discussion progress. I tend to be surprised frequently when someone brings up a brand new factor that you wouldn’t even consider not being in the food service industry. My mind has been blown quite a bit this week. Brett is the individual that tends to surprise me most. Brett’s perspective focuses more on logistics and finances as opposed to customer service.

 Besides the excitement of meeting, Justine and I put some more time into Fresh Bites. We did some recipe touching up and maintenance. We wanted everything to be uniform such as, serving size and instruction format. We all spent time separating dressing from salad recipes, which included making new and separate recipes for the dressing. We are proud of the work we put into this project and I will continue to do touch ups on my own now that Justine has moved on to her next rotation. I have decided a project is never really done. There are always adjustments to be made.

Dianne, Justine, and I got to go on an adventure this week. We went out to US Foods’ Scoop food show. We got to try products from their Scoop line, which is trendier. The line had a focus on sustainable products. Our favorites were dessert; sea salt caramel ice cream and chocolate cake. I also really enjoyed the guacamole. Everything was delicious and, of course, I was stuffed again. Justine and I got to speak with a few incredible people from US Foods about their roles. Later in the week, Don sat down with us at John Green and continued to tell us all about what he does in US Foods and US Foods as a whole. Food distributors, such as US Foods, offer dietetic majors like me another interesting career path.

This week I also got the opportunity to experience the beast that is the interviewing process. ISU uses a style of interviewing that invites the candidate to discuss a situation in the past that reflects their skills or how the individual handled a situation. The purpose of questions that focus on the past is to get a good sense of how the candidate will act in a position. Past performance and actions is indicative of how the candidate will act the future. Watching interviews from the other side has given me a different and helpful perspective for when I go to interview.

Now for the fun stuff. The fun began on Friday when Dianne invited Justine and I to the local theater to watch ten-minute plays that had been submitted from all over with a shared theme of “art gallery”. Justine and I believe that we should have starred in these ten-minute plays after we perfected our art gallery acting for the ISU commercial. That night we  also got to meet Dianne’s friend who used to work at ISU CDS and one of Dianne’s previous dietetic interns. Every year the three of them go to these plays together and I am glad Justine and I got to join them.


This weekend I also made the bold move to take a train to St. Louis for the weekend all by myself. St. Louis was absolutely wonderful! I had great BBQ, which was really the most important thing. The arch is absolutely majestic and it is an exciting trip to the top. The old courthouse is way cooler than you would expect, so definitely go on in. I took a trolley tour to get the feel for the city and see what it has to offer. The city garden was beautiful and has some wonderful art. I hope to one day return to St. Louis and explore some more. Another great week in the books and on to the next one!


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