Featured Intern: Orientation Week 101

By: Amanda Sauceda

Orientation week for my internship is now over and I’m ready to go out and start my first rotation this week.  I came into orientation week not really sure what to expect. Now that I have finished I have come away with so much more information than I thought possible about how an internship works and a great appreciation for my internship director.

My orientation week was five days long and each was a full day of reviewing rotation schedules, P.Es, speakers, and survival tips.  Everyone was very curious and anxious to see where we would be assigned to and that was something we found out the first day.  The topic that took the most time to review was our P.Es.  P.Es is another acronym to add to your list and it stands for planned experiences.  These experiences outline the type of activities that you need to complete there are different P.Es for each emphasis of the internship (i.e. nutrition therapy and community).  Some examples are going to interdepartmental meetings, staff relief, critique publications, and develop/present an in-service.  All the P.Es along with some more info about the internship in general was presented in a very big binder, so the few examples I mentioned are just a snapshot of the variety of activities that will be completed.

In addition we had speakers that came in to discuss what it would be like during our rotation for that emphasis.  There were speakers for our community, nutrition therapy, food service, and school foodservice rotations.  The speakers gave a great idea to what we will be doing and what to expect.  I’ll admit foodservice was never my favorite but we’ll be doing a project where we design a menu on a theme we pick to actually be prepared and served so that’s kind of exciting.

This week was also a time to really get to know the other interns in my class and they are really a great bunch of girls.  I’ve heard time and again that the people in your intern class will become life long friends.  I think this will be true for my intern class because I had such a great time with them this last week and we’ll be to see each other a lot since we have a Monday night graduate class together.

There was so much more information that we learned about these past few days and it was a bit overwhelming at times.  Receiving my binder full of all that paperwork and hearing how our rotations were scheduled really made me appreciate my internship director even more.  There was so much planning that went into the schedule, paperwork that needed to be completed, and each morning she even had a snack for us! She was on top of everything and went over each part of the internship beautifully and answered all our questions.  Overall orientation week went great now on to first week of rotations!