Whew! What a whirlwind two weeks it has been so far! I'm still feeling all kinds of mixed emotions. On a daily basis I feel extremely fortunate to have this opportunity and to have been placed in this internship. I grow to love public health and the preventative nature a little more every day and I'm so inspired to help people make simple changes before they develop health problems. On the other hand, the tasks are so daunting and there is still a lot of unknowns. We don't have a full rotation schedule yet which means I'm unsure of where I will be placed as early as next week. To be clear the schedule is developed but because there are six of us we will all have a slightly different schedule so at this point I don't know if my line on the schedule is #1 or #6. I should have a better idea of what comes next by the end of this week.
Additionally, I feel like I went into class on the first day of school and was handed a syllabus with 75 assignments. We have all of these assignments to complete, meetings to have and projects to accomplish. The problem is that some of the items will be scheduled for me, many I will have to setup and complete myself and others will require that I work together with my co-interns. It's been a process learning how to organize myself and how to best tackle the tasks at hand. However, I have slowly started to figure it all out and I adore my co-interns. We are such unique girls with a variety of backgrounds but we have such similar and complementary personalities and I would honestly chose to be friends with each one of them had we met in a different situation. I'm really enjoying their company and I really look forward to sharing this experience with them.
Here's a quick rundown of the highlight of what I have accomplished so far, I have:
*taught a nutrition education class to welfare recipients
*attended several trainings, meetings and development workshops
*volunteered at a produce and health fair
*completed a site visit with a school garden/youth farmer's market program
*contacted several other individuals about setting up site visits with their nutrition or food program
*monitored a nutrition blog
*checked out a food related app
*researched the Paleo diet for my fad diet paper
*researched the food and cultural customs of Cuba
*researched the role of soy consumption in breast cancer risk
and those are just a few highlights! Last Friday was my favorite day so far. We started the day helping at a produce and health fair hosted by one of the WIC sites. We provided resource information, produce and other groceries to 756 different adults in less than two hours! It was amazing. The people were so grateful and I had the chance to interact with all different ages and cultures. I even got to put my Spanish skills to work. After that I had the opportunity to do a field site visit with a local elementary school that has a student run community garden. The garden is huge and has been around for years. It is no self-sustaining and the kids get the opportunity to sell the produce that they grow at biweekly youth farmer's markets. It was so fun to see the kids using their math skills to make change and to see their excitement about trying new fruits and vegetables (this week we sampled lemon cucumbers).
That's weeks 1 and 2 in a nutshell. There's so much more ahead and I'm looking forward to beginning my first outside rotation soon.
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