Project and Field Trip Fun!!!!

WEEK 7

Monday: Kennesaw State comes to UGA

The tables turned this week on Monday when the Kennesaw State interns came to visit UGA. It was our turn to take them all around UGA and show them how The Big Dawg Eats! In the morning Meghan and I had some time to work on our project and met Kris in her office by noon to meet the interns and Rob from Kennesaw. When they first arrived we gave them a tour of North Campus (Kris did most of the talking). She told them about historical buildings and stories and we even got to ring the victory bell. It was nice for the interns to learn about the rich history of UGA because Kennesaw is such a young school that it was a change for them. We ended our tour of North campus by visiting ‘Tween the Pages’ convenience store in the library. That was the perfect convenience store to show them because it was recently renovated and we got to show them the new products that are now offered as well as the full service coffee bar and kiosks.

Holmes/Hunter Academic Building on North Campus

Meghan, Adriane, Myself, and Natalie in front of The Arch (not arches)

Ringing the bell!!

Next, we headed to The Village Summit to grab a bite to eat and give them a chance to see UGA’s newest operating dining commons. After they got to try our delicious food we gave them a tour of Snelling and they got to talk to Austin from the marketing department about some of the Public Relations things food services does. From Snelling we headed over to The Niche to show them our newest (almost finished) dining location. I was so excited to see all the progress that was made from when we first went out there with Bryan Varin to now. Almost everything was installed, the freezers/refrigerators were running, they were getting the hearth oven up and running, and they fixed the mistakes we saw last time we were there.  I am so excited for the soft openings this coming week to see it all come together and see the end result of building a new dining facility. It was also really excited that we got to go to The Niche today because we got to finally give Greg our binder that we had been working on. He was extremely excited to have it and seemed to be very pleased with us. Greg also showed us how they were going to use some of the picture menus that Meghan and I assembled.

Turn Styles

Fixed the gap between the market deli and the counter

Almost finished

How our menu cards will help!

From The Niche we headed to The Tate Center to show them around Bulldog Café and The Tate Café. They had a similar location at Kennesaw, but it is always important to compare and contrast and maybe even see room for improvements (it seems they want to up their digital signage). After we finished touring we got to sit down a little before we had to head to orientation. We compared Kennesaw and UGA and discussed different elements of each universities food service. It was a nice reflection period before ending our day with the food service speech and video for the Freshman Orientation. All in all the day was great and I think it was beneficial for us to tour each other’s facilities and see what differences there are and even reflect on how we can help improve ourselves.

Tuesday: Catering Time

In the morning Meghan and I had a meeting with Adam who is a manager at The Village Summit. Our meeting was to discuss decorations as well as finalize them so we know exactly what we need to get from Allison. We decided on banners and locations for the banners, center pieces, roll-up menu tags, and discussed some of the things we need to make for the event. Many of the things will be executed this coming week, as we will be spending a majority of our free time at The Summit. I am excited to see all of our decorations come together at the end of this! We put so work into finding the right images and designing the menu/ menu tags.

The afternoon consisted of me going to the catering office and discussing Candice’s job with her. Catering is under the retail operations side of food services. Candice takes calls for events as well as enters all of the catering events, follows up, bills the customers, and is in charge of gift-o-grams. One thing I noticed right off the bat is that it is very important to keep organized! She has binders for the current month that has all the events and then an even bigger binder that has all the events up to the date for the WHOLE year (HUGE binder). The process in scheduling an event is she first fills out a purple sheet for each event with: name, date, number of guests, food menu, etc. She will then enter it into her calendar on outlook. I was fascinated that it was all done through outlook, even FoodPro connects to outlook so she can it can account for the food. The event will be tentative until she follows up to confirm it. Something that caught my eye during this process was the different colors for different events (more organizing) and Candice informed me that it was to mark events under certain characteristics. For instance yellow is special events (no charge), green is delivery, dark green is drop off, orange is pick up, red is late booking ( 15% charge), and burgundy is for after the event when she sends them an invoice. I asked Candice about forecasting how much food for each event and she said FoodPro puts in an initial number and she will mess around with it until she thinks it is at its proper number so they do not run out of food (very important). She said it takes practice and experience to get it just right and make sure she stays at or below a thirty-three percent food cost without the miscellaneous charges to the customer. Even by the end I still had a hard time wrapping my head around the fact it was all in outlook.

Wednesday: Project Fun

Wednesday morning started off with Meghan and me heading over to Snelling to work with Allison on all of our prints for the banquet. We mainly discussed our menu tags and got the guidelines to put them together. Meghan and I decided to make our menu tags look like post cards from the city of our featured city. We took a picture of a landmark or skyline and put that in the middle then put a border around it and added the item name and city. We got those together then printed, laminated, and cut them to size. In this time we also sent images to Scott (Graphic Designer) for what we wanted our framed pictures to look like so he could crop and print those. After we got our menu tags together it was time for us to head over to The Summit.

Menu tags

Meg working hard

At The Summit we had time to test our pizza dough recipe with Sam again. Unfortunately, it did not go as well as our last batch. I believe this to be because we cooked it in a hotel pan and then placed it on top of a sheet pan. This is all a hypothesis, but I think it was too thick of surfaces for all the heat to radiate through and it left it very doughy in the middle. As far as the crust goes we still have some kinks to work out this coming week, Chicago Deep-Dish is very tough to master! Although, the crust did not come out as planned  texture wise, Meghan said the taste was authentic and we could all agree that the taste of the topping was to die for! With-in the next few weeks we will become master Deep-Dish pizza makers!

Thursday: FIELD TRIP

Thursday morning we started off with my favorite thing ever, COFFEE!!! Kris took Meghan and I to the Jittery Joes (local Athens coffee company) roasting facility (the place smelled amazing). They roast and package all of their coffee at this facility by hand. The roaster gave us a little tour and then showed us how he roasted the coffee/packaged them. I did not realize how much science and specifics went into roasting coffee to get the exact flavor you want. Their house coffee is a blend of two different beans, which before going here I did not even know that it was possible. Since the beans can change with demand they don't always have the same bean, but a bean that can give the same taste. This allows them to swap the bean out for another kind possibly from another coffee, but still get the same flavor. We got to feel the different beans and it was fascinating that they were all different weights because of the density and you could actually tell when you picked them up. He then took us to taste some of the coffees; you sniff it, swirl to cool, and then taste it—of course I liked all of them. We luckily got to taste a new coffee that he had just roasted yesterday, a Kenyan coffee. We all fell in love with it and just had to get some before we left the store that day! The building was so rustic and unique which I really liked about the shop. They will actually be moving to a new building in a little which apparently has its own character as well so I am bummed I won’t be able to see that place.

The Roasting Facility of Jittery Joes

The Roaster

Packaging the beans

In the afternoon we headed out to the Mayfield Dairy Farms in Braselton, Georgia to meet with Carlton (sales) and lucky for us Scottie Mayfield. Scottie Mayfield is a member of the Mayfield family and figure of the public eye from all of his commercials in the past (Meghan and I like to say we met a Southern Celebrity). Mayfield currently supplies all of the milk for the dining commons and UGA and we are currently deciding whether to switch to their ice cream. Unfortunately at the Braselton facility only makes their milk; the ice cream is made in Athens, Tennessee. First, we got a little history lesson on Mayfield Dairy and then we went on a tour of the Facility, guided by Scottie himself. It was really neat to get the tour from Scottie because he told us little things about their development and family through-out the tour. Some things I learned from the tour are how important it is to properly rinse out and clean their equipment often so the bacteria’s do not grow. They also do not allow any milk in their facility that has any antibiotics in it. They run a quick preliminary test first and if that shows up positive then they do a much more extensive test to prove if there are in fact antibiotics in the milk. If there is then they send the milk back and figure out the source of the antibiotics and that single farm has to pay for that whole vessel of milk. The most interesting (to me) and distinguishing thing about Mayfield is their yellow jugs of milk. They do this because without a tinted color to their jugs fluorescent and indirect lights will compromise both the taste and vitamins in the milk. It is something that is very important to them and there are even studies to prove the science behind it all. I enjoyed the tour very much and was really happy Scottie got to give it to us.

The sales process was very interesting and new to me. I have never been involved in sales and the process behind it, so I learned what a sales pitch in person actually looks like and how they try and lure you in. If it was up to Meghan and I we would have been sold the second they gave us our ‘swag bags’, but it is more important than that. They have to take into account the price, which other vendors are, the quality, the distribution process, etc. I enjoyed seeing the sales take place first hand and seeing what things are discussed and the points that each party makes.

The Facility

Miniature Version (cow and everything)

Our SWAG  BAG

autograph book!

Myself and Scottie Mayfield (do not mind my cheeeesing smile)

After Mayfield Meghan and I headed over to meet with Jeanne Fry (Executive Director). We did not have any set format we discussed all types of topics like her management style, advice, motivation tricks, and more. It was really great to sit down with someone with a lot of experience and learn from them. Here are some things I took out of our time with Jeanne:

1.      Embrace change- Time and energy wasted on saying ‘I can’t’ is energy you could have used to figure out how you can.

2.      Look for opportunities in failures

3.      Having a team is important—team building

4.      Be tough but fair

5.      When a problem arises go to your boss with a solution in mind

6.      You have to get the right people on the ‘bus’ and then get the right people in the right seats. This was used when discussing building a team in order to reach your common goal.

I found this time to be very informative and useful. I especially liked getting her ideas on different motivational tricks for your staff.

Friday: Management Workshop

On Friday we had the management workshop all day (8:30-5). It was weird for me to be sitting in a classroom facility for such a long time, because we had such an active learning experience this summer. They divided it into two different sessions this summer and Meghan and I both had the later one. I was really looking forward to this day to see what kind of topics they discuss with managers and how they motivate them to keep doing their job.

The first topic of the day was about diversity and effective communication in diverse group. The speaker Randolph Carter from the Office of Institutional Diversity was awesome and really kept us up and participating. He informed us of that 99% of conflicts stem from communication and discussed how important it is to be able to communicate respectfully in stressful situations. One of the things that really got me thinking is when we had to think about what influences shape our self identity out of family, education, media, and friends. It is something I have never thought about and it was interesting for me to see what influences me. I also found his topic on communication styles very important. It is very important to be about to communicate effectively if you are a manager and it is equally as important to recognize that not everyone has the same style and you may have to switch it up. The different styles that Randolph introduced to us were:

1.      direct vs. indirect

2.      emotionally charged or emotionally flat

3.      personal or strictly business

4.      more or less confrontational

5.      more or less connected to accomplished a task.

It is something I will keep with me and remind myself when I go out into the working world that everyone is different and each person prefers a certain style. Finally, he finished off with four key responses to a situation which will help better your outcome and they are:

THAT’S INTERSTING…

1.      tell me more?

2.      why would you say that?

3.      why would you do that?

4.      Why would you ask that?

Next, we discussed Non-discrimination and Anti-harrasment with a guest speaker. I was thrilled when I realized I knew everything already because of taking HR already..THANKS Dr. Tews!! After this talk we went to have an excellent steak lunch and had a half hour to golf on the driving range. I had so much fun doing that!

GOLFING!

To end our day we had Kris (our intern coordinator) as our speaker to talk about two different topics: personal accountability and time management. When we learned about personal accountability we learned incorrect questions: why (me)- which makes yourself the victim, when—procrastination thinking, and who- blame thinking. All of these are roadblocks to success because you are waiting around and not acting. Something which I can definitely put into use after this workshop is the question behind the question; which beings with a what or how, contains an I, and focuses on action. Kris’s next topic was on time management and although I thought I had a lot of knowledge on it I still learned a few things. The one I will remember best is recognizing the difference between what is important and what is urgent. Something that you can do to help yourself with this is by prioritizing your to do list by ranking each task an A,B, or C. I really enjoyed being able to partake in the workshop and it is refreshing to know there is still so much you can learn even after so many years in a job.

I CANNOT believe we are about to start week 8 and after this week is finished we have 3 more days and then I go home. The time has flown by :(

FREE TIME

This week we were able to go to a fight club class with Nicole Lovely. It was the first time I did any type of boxing/fighter class and I FELL in love—I will definitely look into it at Penn State. 

Fight Club

Over the weekend we went on a trip to Savannah with Adriane (one of the Kennesaw interns). I was in awe by the beauty of the town and the history! The Spanish Moss is so beautiful and it is hard to capture in a picture—I did stay away from touching it because I did not want to get nasty chiggers. We got to see Tybee Island which was also really pretty-despite the rain. I can totally see myself living the Savannah area later in life.

Tress with Spansh Moss