Week 6-7 at Penn State

Hello, it is Hannah and Michelle again!

We cannot believe that next week is our final week of the internship. The time at Penn State has gone by extremely fast since we have been learning a lot and having so much fun!

Week 6:
On Monday we visited Shaver's Creek which is about 20 minutes away from campus. The reason we went here is to complete ice breaker challenges and really get us to enhance our team building skills. Maria thought this would be good for us since our management rotations start soon and we will be working closely with one another!

Such a beautiful day! 

For this exercise we all had to walk on trollies together and communicate!

This was a huge wooden platform that was unbalanced, we worked together to get it to balance straight

After shavers creek, we did our culinary challenge. For this event we each picked out salad recipes with homemade dressing that we wanted to prepare and we had a competition! Chef Mark was great and had our work stations set up for us and he assisted us when we needed it. Below are pictures of our salads: Michelle made a Southwestern Chicken Salad, Marie made a Peach Summer Salad,
Niki made a Pina Colada Chicken Salad and Hannah made an Autumn Cobb Salad.

Presenting in front of our judges! Mr. Hopey, Cheff Bill, and SNA's interns, and Meghan ______

Marie's salad won the competition so we will be planning our final farewell luncheon based off of her salad! We started planning our luncheon right after her salad won. So far we have picked out a theme, brainstormed decoration ideas, sent out our evites, had our menu designed by Mary _____, and planned the rest of the menu! On our blog four we will tell you the menu and theme, but for now its a surprise, so check back in!

Later on this week, Maria was able to get us an appointment for professional photos! We went to the arboretum for these and it was a lot of fun!

Week 7:

We started our management rotations this week which has been a big learning experience. On day 1 and 2 Niki and Hannah were at Pollock Dining Commons and we shadowed Kevin Johnston and Jamie Robinson. Kevin showed us how to do inventory in their 35 degree coolers and it was so cold! Luckily he gave us warm fleece jackets and gloves. He also showed us how to do a building safety inspection which was really interesting. Jamie taught us all about Foodpro and had us shadow a crew leader for the lunch shift. It was really fun spending time with these two because they really wanted us to learn and they taught us so much about the management role in the food service industry.

On day 1 and 2 for Michelle and Marie, they were at Redifer Dining Commons. They spent their time learning how to cashier and supervise the different food stations in the dining hall.

For days 3 and 4 we switched places, Hannah and Niki went to Redifer and Marie and Michelle went to Pollock.

We also had the opportunity to shadow Meghan Kronenwetter and her 2 interns, which was really great. The interns showed us what they were working on and we learned what they do on a daily basis. They make educational food pamphlets, work with the menu and allergy cards, and they set up booths at the HUB to try and spread the word on healthy eating topics! Meghan also asked each one of us to write a blog for their website so we have all been working on that also.

Stay tuned for next week where we will show you pictures of our farewell luncheon!