A Lovely Summer in Laramie (University of Wyoming – Week 1)

Hello, everyone!  My name is Emily.  Claire and I are the interns at the University of Wyoming, and this internship has been an awesome experience so far.  Everyone has been so friendly and welcoming that they have helped me to feel at home here after a short amount of time.

About Me

I am from Southern California and studying dietetics at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah.  I love food and cooking, and I hope this internship will help me learn how I can share my excitement for delicious healthy meals with others.

Laramie and UW

It has been interesting to transition from heavily populated California to a town whose population is roughly equal to the student population of BYU, but I love the relaxed and friendly atmosphere here.  Monday mostly consisted of meeting the managers we’ll work with and touring UW campus and the beautiful surrounding landscape of Laramie.  There are several National Parks nearby with great hiking trails and camping sites that I’m excited to explore.  There’s even a pyramid (see Claire's post for a picture) – a monument to the Ames brothers who built Laramie’s railroad (and the monument itself, haha).  Random, huh?

The view from my plane to Laramie.  Beautiful!

Vedauwoo (vee-duh-voo): easy on the eyes but difficult to say.

Aspens might be my new favorite tree.

I really like this path by the IT building.

What I’ve Been Learning

So far, our activities and projects this week have been fun and diverse.  Claire already did a good job of documenting our day-to-day responsibilities, so I'm going to just highlight the most interesting/important things I have learned this week.

• ·    Human Resources: Try not to look at employees as “a body to fill the job.”  It’s important to prepare them adequately for their jobs and figure out how to make their experiences better so that they stay.  A lot of people and resources get involved to deal with high employee turnover.
• ·    Safety & Sanitation: I learned from Laramie’s awesome health inspector that when doing inspections, it’s important to give people suggestions and solutions for how they can comply with health codes.  You can tell people over and over that their facility needs cleaning, but providing names of companies or products that will suit their needs will make it more likely for them to actually make changes.
• ·    CBORD: CBORD is an exceedingly complicated program, and I respect anyone who has the ability to use it.
• ·    Sustainability: One of the school’s sustainability projects has been to plant vegetables in some beds outside of the Washakie Dining Center.  Claire and I had fun helping with the planting this year.  The managers at UW are also trying to combat food waste.  Washakie is all-you-can-eat, and a lot gets thrown away.  The managers have tried to increase student awareness about throwing away food, and they have also sent some of the waste to Acres farm to be turned into compost.  We used some of that compost in the garden, which was a cool experience.
• ·    Creativity: making an at least semi-attractive bulletin board display is hard work, people. 

All in all, ….

I’m having a great experience.  One of my favorite things about this internship is that I can geek out about food and nutrition because I’m around other people who care about it like I do.  I hope everyone else is enjoying their internship as much as I am.