It's hard to believe it, but I'm done with the first 12 weeks of my 46 week internship. Whew! In general, it feels like it is going by so fast. Next week I start my food service rotation and I can't wait. We have had a lot of "office time" spent just working our way through assignments over the last two weeks and I'm starting to get really tired of spending 10 hours a day in an office chair and then in the car commuting. My posture is seriously suffering! I'm ready for a change and a chance to be out and about on my feet.
It's been a rough month or so for me emotionally and I must say that some things have come up in my personal life along the way (during the internship) that have been challenging and I wasn't really prepared to deal with that on top of the stress of the internship. I will say that I don't think that it really affected my performance at the internship but it has really affected my emotional state and my behaviors outside of it. There was a kidnapping/murder in my childhood (and current) neighborhood that went unsolved for several weeks and I was really surprised at how much that rattled my sense of security. I became obsessed about checking the news for updates even when I knew that watching all the reports was likely adding to my anxiety. The great part of watching all of this news coverage though was that it continually reinforced my decision to not follow my first career path (broadcast news) and to pursue my current one...dietetics! It was reassuring to finally KNOW in my heart and be able to internalize that I'm in the right place professionally.
Then we had an unexpected late night phone call that kept my husband and I up really late one night last week which was also somewhat emotionally draining the next day. Luckily, both of these events are in the past now and I'm feeling much better about everything now that the murderer has been caught. But I will say that this has definitely been the biggest challenge for me thus far with balancing the "interruptions" in my personal life and sorting through those emotions while still performing at my best on a daily basis. Maybe it's because I'm a planner and I had thought through everything else. I had prepared myself for the commute, for the financial aspects of having to give up my paying job and pay $6,000 of tuition without student loans but I never thought about what "else" might be going on around me outside of work.
I had a meeting with my internship director today to discuss my
progress so far and it went extremely well. It was great to sit down
with her and talk about how everything was going and it was reassuring
to get some positive feedback. I'm in a great place now though and now that I'm already a quarter of the way through, I'm ready to keep going and to keep experiencing new opportunities and areas of dietetics.
