Week 6 at University of Washington!

Hello again from Seattle! We had an exciting week packed with a lot of fun learning and adventures that we can't wait to share with you!

Katy started off the week by working in the Husky Den kitchen for the day. The Husky Den is the food court inside the student union building and it has a burger concept, a soup and salad concept, an Asian fusion concept, and a pizza concept open during the summer. She worked a little bit of all of them and had a blast seeing how such a huge place operates and feeds so many students each day.

While Katy was in the kitchen, Modjeska continued to assist in the year-end inventory process by sitting in on meetings with the managers going through the discrepancies we found in their inventories and sorting them out one by one.

On Tuesday we accompanied our forever amazing internship coordinator, Kara, to downtown Seattle to volunteer at the ACUHO-i conference. ACUHO-i is the Association of College and University Housing Officers- International, and each year they have a conference where staff from Universities all over the world come and learn about what each other are doing and what is new in the world of housing. We got to sit in on a few sessions and learned a ton about what universities are doing to be more environmentally sustainable. Dining obviously plays a huge role in that, so it was interesting to see how housing and dining work together and how they depend on each other.

On Wednesday we were back in the office putting final touches on our catering project before we presented it to Kara on Friday. We also started a new project with the recycling signage around campus. There are signs above the recycling and composting bins around campus telling you what goes in which bin, but they can be confusing and some are not up to date. We are researching what other Universities are doing and how to be effective and clear in communicating what to throw away, recycle, and compost.

On Thursday Katy was back in the kitchen, but this time she was in 815 Mercer, which is a cafe in the UW Medical Center. She learned how to cook the perfect burger and made a lot of salads, and it was a blast!

A before and after shot of the
newest site we were weeding and mulching!

Friday started off by presenting our findings from our catering benchmarking project to Kara, and working with her to come up with recommendations to present to our director of dining and our catering team. After that, we had a tour at the UW Farm and got to work on the farm for a couple hours! The UW Farm began in 2006 with a group of students growing a small plot of food on campus, and has grown into a student and faculty run farm with four unique spaces on campus! It has a CSA program for students and provides a lot of produce for many of the dining concepts on campus. It was really fun to get our hands dirty weeding and mulching while also learning about the process and challenges of growing food for such a large scale operation.

Over the weekend we went hiking and camping in Olympic National Park! On Friday we took the ferry to Bainbridge Island to meet a friend, who then drove us to the park. We camped at a camp ground outside the park on Friday night, and woke up early Saturday morning to reserve our camping spot at Grand Lake in the park. We then drove into Olympic (which was an amazing drive full of breathtaking views), parked the car, and hiked to our camp spot. It was a beautiful 4 mile hike that ended at Grand Lake, which has the clearest (and coldest) water. We spent the day doing some more hiking, fishing, and napping. When we woke up on Sunday morning we ate breakfast, packed up, and hiked back up to the car. It was a pretty tough hike back up and there were definitely times when the elevation got to us and we felt pretty dizzy, but it was beautiful and so worth it. We made our way back to campus Sunday night and passed out pretty soon after we got back to our apartment. It was an incredible weekend. Sorry for the picture overload, but it was too beautiful not to share!