This week marks the halfway point of our internship, so the Wiscandians had to get to get down to business. It’s hard to believe how fast these last 4 weeks have gone by, but we have truly enjoyed every second thus far. This week was crucial for our special event dinner that we are planning for the end of July. Our theme is going to be “The Amazon Rainforest” and we are developing our menu around the countries that flow along the Amazon river (Brazil, Peru, etc..). We finalized our menu options this week and were able to dabble with a little experimentation of flan...which turned out, well, lets just say it didn’t turn out at all. Have you ever tried to make flan in cupcake tins? Basically the hardest thing ever. Good thing impossible is nothing to the Wiscandians. This upcoming week is where we are finishing all the testing of our recipes, and the Wiscandians are hoping they will turn out better than the flan we experimented with this week. Stay tuned to see how things turn out.....
Besides the food, we had to get the word out on our little shindig so we met with the marketing department. We learned about the psychology of marketing and what goes into developing a successful advertisement; it's a lot more that throwing some pictures on a page and calling it a day. You have to know your target market and the methods on how to attract that population. We also got to help with redeveloping their KU Dining website using Google Analytics. Google Analytics is probably one of the most technologically advanced programs the Wiscandians have every seen. It analyzes an entire website's activity with respect to how many times a person visits and clicks on a specific location within the website. This information creates a whole different perspective as to how the website is created and organized to allow the right advertisement to be seen by the right person at their easiest convenience. Hopefully Google Analytics will make our Amazon rainforest one of the most popular hits on the KU Dining website... The Wiscandians have faith!
One remarkable thing about the KU Dining management team is how unique and different each manager runs their own designated operation. This week we shadowed David over at Oliver Residential Dining and Ron that runs the Grab and Go operations, no they don't sell any Big Gulps but they have a hot dog stand.
Both of these departments are considerably successful and both operations are run very differently. This is mostly because of the manager that runs each operation! Just goes to show you that there isn’t a uniform way in running an operation. The Wiscandians have learned so much about different managerial approaches to running a successful operation, all thanks to the amazingly hard working managers here at KU Dining.
The last item of agenda that we experienced this week was touring the University of Missouri campus. When you think of the word “rival” you think of two organizations that can’t stand each other... which 99.9% of the time is true. Their rivalry dates all the way back to the Civil War but this week, Mark from Mrs. E’s Residential Dining took us to the there to talk business. Mizzou has a smoker that KU is buying and they needed to check it out. It was a pretty cool trip knowing that two rival schools are willing to help each other out when it comes to investing large amounts of money into one of their pieces of equipment. That being said....ROCK CHALK JAYHAWK!
Until next week...
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