University of Washington Week 8!

It is our last day here at the University of Washington, and what a ride it has been. We are so sad to leave, but so thankful for this experience. We have learned so much and can't thank NACUFS and UW enough for this opportunity. 

This week was pretty jam packed despite being our last week here! On Monday we had a few meetings and prepared for our big presentation on Tuesday to the HFS central leadership team. We had a pretty strict time slot on their agenda, so we practiced a lot to make sure we got it right. Also on Monday we had the chance to learn about the coffee roasting process from our campus coffee expert, and even got to roast our own batch of coffee. It was so interesting and delicious!

 

Adding the beans to roast!

The beans during the roasting!

The beans cooling after the roasting!

On Tuesday we started the day with our presentation, which went great! After that we had evaluations with our amazing internship coordinator, Kara, where we discussed our strengths and weaknesses and gave feedback for the program. Then, the whole office bought us lunch from Great State Burger and it was delicious! Later in the afternoon we had even more yummy celebrations, with fruit and a HUGE (6.6 lbs) container of Nutella, cheesecake, and root beer floats. Dreams do come true.

With our certificates!

Wednesday was spent in the catering department, learning the ropes, sitting in on a few meetings, and helping set up for some events. Catering is a huge and daunting operation, and it was fascinating to see how it works. 

On Thursday we sat in on our last dining administration meeting :( and spent the rest of the day wrapping up our projects and putting the final touches on them. After work we headed downtown for the last time to say our goodbyes to Seattle. We went on the Ferris wheel at sunset, which gave the most incredible view of the mountains as well as the city. It was the perfect way to end our time here.

Mount Ranier!

Today (Friday) is our last day of work, and we are sad about it. We will be ending our time here with some meetings, inventory audits, and lunch with Gary and Dean. We are so sad to leave, but excited to apply everything we have learned. 

So long, Seattle. We love you!

Week 7 at University of Washington!

We can't believe we are entering our last week of this amazing internship. Neither of us are ready to leave, so we are taking in every moment this week.

Getting ready to eat some seafood!

Last week was a busy but fun week! We started with week with a seafood tasting with the company we get a majority of our seafood from. The purpose was to learn more about the various products they have and learn more ways to prepare it. It was delicious!

The rest of Monday was spent preparing for 1 of 2 end of internship presentations. We are presenting about what we did over the internship and what we learned to two different groups. The first group was the dining administration team on Tuesday, and it went great! It was definitely nerve racking but it was great to work on our presentation skills and practice before we present to the HFS central leadership team next week.

On Wednesday we got to go to a tasting of Beecher's cheese! Beecher's is an amazing cheese made right here in Seattle.  It was absolutely delicious and really interesting to hear more about the process of how they make cheese and the story behind the business.

The rest of the week was spent putting final touches on our various projects and presenting them to our supervisors. This includes our retail benchmarking project, catering benchmarking project, and retail pricing review. We got some great feedback and are continuing to work on them this coming week. It feels great to have some closure with what we have been working on throughout our time here at UW.



On Friday we had the opportunity to go to yet another tasting, this time a breakfast sampling at one of our on campus restaurants that will be opening for breakfast soon. It was delicious!


Over the weekend, Modjeska's parents came, and we got to show them all of our favorite parts of Seattle! This of course included Pike's Place and the Space Needle, and we also explored the Chihuly Garden and Glass exhibit. Then on Sunday we spent the day driving around Mt. Ranier National Park! It never stops taking our breath away.

Narada Falls

One of the pieces at Chihuly

We have some exciting things coming for our last week here, so stay tuned!

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!

Dizzy but happy!

A view of Grand Lake from above!

With our little trout we caught!

We can't believe we only have two weeks left and are taking in every moment we can. Until next week!

Week 5 at University of Washington!

It's crazy to think that we only have three weeks left here in Seattle! It feels like we just started this internship yesterday.

This week we mainly focused on auditing inventories from different units around campus. It's been interesting to see what the year end inventory process is like and how time consuming it can be. Auditing inventories is essentially going through the hand counted inventory and comparing that line by line with the inventory that was input into CBORD (the database UW uses) to see if there were any discrepancies.

DONUTS

While we weren't auditing inventories, we worked on our catering benchmarking project. We're looking at other universities from around the country to see how their catering services compare to ours here at UW, in order to see how we can further improve our services to our guests.

On Wednesday, we had a donut tasting from one of our vendors to see if we wanted to bring more options to the students. There were so many fun and different varieties to try, such as maple bacon and PB&J!


Friday night, we went to a music festival in West Seattle that a co-worker told us about. We didn't really know of the bands that were playing, but it was still fun to go out and see a different part of Seattle that we haven't explored yet!

On Sunday we went to Ballard, where they had this HUGE farmer's market/art festival. We could've spent the whole day wandering around the different booths. After the market, we went to the Ballard Locks where you can see boats of all sizes being raised and lowered between stretches of water of different levels. The Ballard Locks connect the Puget Sound, Lake Washington, and Lake Union. It was so awesome to watch! In the same area as the locks is a salmon ladder where you can watch the salmon run. It must have been the wrong time of year, because we didn't see any salmon running, but we did get to see them swimming around. They were mighty big fish!

Boats entering the locks to be raised

Some sockeye salmon

We have some pretty fun and exciting things coming next week so stay tuned!

University of Washington Week 4!

Our time in Seattle is halfway done and we are not happy about it. It already feels like home and we don't like to think about leaving. Luckily we still have four more weeks and we are excited to keep learning!

This week was pretty packed with lots of projects and fun adventures. On Monday we had another ice cream tasting (I know, life if tough) and it did not disappoint. We are now in the process of deciding which vendor to go with and learning a lot about the process of introducing a new concept into a dining facility. Turns out there is a lot more to it than just trying ice cream!

The rest of Monday and Tuesday morning was spent preparing for a presentation to the safety team on food allergens. The purpose of our presentation was to give a quick brush up on food allergens to the managers, as well as resources that they can take back to their staff for training. It was great public speaking experience as well as training as future dietitians.

On Tuesday we had our presentation and it went great! It sparked conversation and based off feedback it seemed like the managers had a lot of takeaways. After work on Tuesday we went to the Mariners vs. Pirates game and it was a blast! We enjoyed some delicious "shiskaberries" and watched the Mariners win!

Wednesday was spent working on an extension of our previous benchmarking project. We were out and about all day comparing prices and bringing back our recommendations on vending and retail prices. It was nice to get out of the office for the day.

The rest of the week was devoted to assisting with the year-end inventory process. It is a long and time consuming process so we are happy to help wherever we can. We conducted some audits in various units, which basically means we watch employees take inventory and check a few items to make sure it was done correctly. It was very interesting and we got to see first hand how tedious it can be.

On Friday we sat in on a meeting with the dining administration staff and our fearless director of dining, Gary. In the meeting they discussed their visions and goals for the coming year, and it was really inspiring to hear what they want to accomplish. It was a great reminder that dining is so much more than food to a campus, but a way to bring people together and bring about positive social change.

Over the fourth of July weekend we took a trip to Portland, Oregon! It was such a fun weekend filled with exploring and eating some amazing food. We took to train down, and the ride was so beautiful. We stayed at my (Katy's) cousin's apartment and she showed us around all weekend. On Saturday we explored the Portland area and ate at some awesome restaurants, and on Sunday we spent the day hiking and sunbathing around Trillium Lake. The lake sits next to Mount Hood, and it makes for some amazing views. On Monday we made a homemade brunch before getting on our train back to Seattle. We were so exhausted that we fell asleep before making it to the fireworks, but we heard they were amazing!

The train ride along the water

Hiking around the lake

Floating in the lake

The beautiful rose gardens

Can't wait for the coming week!

University of Washington Week 3!

 Hello again from Seattle!

We have just finished up our third week here at UW and can't believe how fast it's going. We started out the week with another ice cream tasting, and this time there were cookies included! We have one more company to test before we decide on which ice cream to bring in, but we wouldn't mind trying a new one every week. :) Besides ice cream, Monday was also spent reviewing the results of a food waste and recovery survey that UW participated in. We learned a lot about what UW and the city of Seattle are currently doing to decrease food waste while feeding the hungry, and what more they can do.

On Tuesday we were informed that we would be leading the monthly safety group meeting on a topic of our choice. We will be presenting on food allergens and how to prevent cross contact in front of all the dining managers, so they can take the material back to their employees. So, we have been working on this presentation, as well as other projects throughout the week.

Another project we have been working on is to go through the prices in the campus market as well as their purchase history and make suggestions on which prices to change. This goes along with our benchmarking project where we compared the prices of surrounding markets, restaurants, and grocery stores. Overall we are looking at the whole picture of pricing and learning a lot about value and food costs!

Slurping coffee!

On Wednesday we sat in on the dining leadership meeting. During the meeting, Joseph, who is in charge of the UW coffee roasting program, presented on his most recent trip to Nicaragua where he visited the farms we get the coffee beans from. It was super cool, and from there we were able to go to our very first coffee cupping! A coffee cupping is where the aroma and taste of various coffees are tested and graded. We were total amateurs, but had so much fun learning and slurping our coffee as loudly as possible.

Thursday was spent working on our various projects, running a few errands to the units, and attending a recycling webinar. If you can't tell, UW works to be as sustainable as possible and it is interesting and encouraging to watch a large institution work towards having as little waste as possible. We wish all schools would do the same!

On Friday we had the chance to sit in on an annual meeting with one of our biggest food vendors. We learned a lot about what that relationship looks like as well as the quantity of food it takes to feed a campus of this size.

This weekend and throughout the week we of course had plenty more Seattle adventures. The other people in the pictures are ACUHO-i interns at UW - we take on many of our adventures with them because the more the merrier! We had the chance to go to the only Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room. It was a HUGE Starbucks with a gigantic roaster, a really unique menu, and awesome Starbucks merchandise. As big Starbucks fans, we were in heaven. We got a shot of espresso with mint syrup and sparkling water. So yummy! To top it off, inside the tasting room there is a PIZZA restaurant, so of course we got some delicious pizza to go with our coffee.

This weekend was Pride weekend in Seattle, so we spent a lot of time at the Pride festivities, as well as an amazing brunch at Portage Bay cafe. Can you tell we love documenting our food almost as much as we love eating it?

All the interns at brunch!

Modjeska's huevos rancheros

All the interns at the Pride parade

Until next time!
Katy and Modjeska