Featured Intern: A Little Something Unexpected

By: Amanda Sauceda

Everyone works very hard to be to get accepted into an internship so that means you learn how to become an expert multi-tasker.  You have to juggle school, studying, having a life, and sometimes working.   Like many students I had to work during school but now that I am in my internship I’m no longer working.  What I didn’t anticipate for the start of my internship is being thrown off my groove and having to switch gears quite a bit.

I was so used to working during the day with class a couple times a week then studying at night.  That was my schedule for the last five years of my life.  I figured that my internship would give me a similar schedule just without the afternoon and evening classes.  While the schedule is as I expected what I didn’t count on was how it would throw me off a bit.  My old routine allowed me to do so many things that I haven’t been able to find the time for now.  I was able to check my various email accounts more often, read the paper everyday, and just follow up on anything that interested me.  I knew where and when I would have the time to do these things.  Now it’s a bit different because I no longer have a set routine.  Plus I will have a new routine every 6-9 weeks with each new rotation site.

But like I said in the beginning dietetic students are hard workers and nothing but resourceful.  I was a little disoriented at first but I mentally just switched gears broke down what I had to do and did it.  Whenever you get put into a situation that’s unfamiliar I always think about it like when you’re a kid playing with building blocks.  Your past experiences are now your blocks.  Just grab from your past experiences and stack them together until you get the desired result.  When you break it down and think back to past experiences you realize that your new situation isn’t too different from what you’ve done before.  So now that I am getting my new routine down I’m finding the time to read the paper and do all the other little things.  It just takes a bit moving around and drawing from past experiences to get into the swing of things.