Last day... :-(

I can not believe today is our last day here at UGA. This summer went by so fast. I will be sad to leave, I feel like I was really getting use to it here and enjoying myself. Our last week went by even faster than I thought it would. We started the week out on Monday with our closing banquet for freshman college. We received a lot of positive feedback for the event and I was very pleased with how it turned out. The attendance was over 300 people which was great!

Tuesday we presented our chemical project to Jeannie and a couple other managers. The project was cumulative of what we have done all summer so it was exciting for us to finally share it with Jeannie.

Wednesday we had the taste testing for Five-Star dinner. I thought all the food was really good and I can tell the students will really enjoy it in the fall.

Thursday was our last day. We had a farewell brunch, and had a chance to say goodbye to all of the people we had met this summer.

I learned a lot at UGA this summer and really felt as though it was a beneficial way to spend my summer. If I could start it all over again I would do it again. I now have a different take on University/Collegiate food services and plan to consider it when i graduate.


Thank you everyone at NACUFS and special thanks to the Food Service staff at UGA I will remember you all forever!

Leaving...

• This was our last week here at UGA. We got to tie up a lot of loose ends before leaving.
• Monday night was our Greek banquet for Freshmen College. We spent a lot of time getting everything set up before the event. Everything ended up looking really good and was what we had wanted. The event itself was also a success. There were over 300 attendees which was an impressive turnout. The food got a lot of compliments despite a couple of snafus. We managed to keep from overwhelming the menu with feta cheese in every dish, but the lemons snuck past us. Hopefully everyone else had as much fun with the event as we did.
• Tuesday Julia and I made our presentation on our chemical presentation to the Director of Food Services and several management people. We narrowed all of our recommendations down to 2 options for the university. It was really successful and there is now an action plan in place for UGA to follow through with the project now that we're leaving.
• Wednesday was another fun day. We got to go to the taste testing for the 5 Star Dinner menu that we put together earlier this summer. A few of the recipes had been swapped out, but the menu was still mostly intact. Each of the dining halls was asked to make several of the dishes. Then the chefs brought the food to the tasting. We got to hear about the changes that they had already made to the recipes and what other alterations were going to be necessary. Then everyone got to eat. There were a couple of crowd favorites and a few of the dishes still needed improvements, but overall it was a fun time.
• We also did the final revisions on the article that was written for NACAS. It is now completely done and has been turned in. Hopefully it is accepted for publication sometime in the next year.
• On our last day, everyone threw us a good-bye reception. Chef Bryan put together some fresh fruit and pastries for us. We got to say good-bye to everyone. Then Kris gave us our final evaluations and our summer internship was over.
• I have to say that this has been a great experience. Not only did I have a ton of fun and meet some great people this summer, but I also got a lot of hands-on training in areas that I hadn't before. The projects that we completed were really worthwhile and I'd definitely recommend for anyone interested in food in any way to consider applying for this internship.

Getting so close!

I started off this week with office time. Monday was spent with a lot of time getting everything ready for the banquet next week. I moved all the decorations from Bolton over to Summit. The rest of the day was spent tying up all the loose ends for the dinner the following Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday were spent at the retail operations. Tuesday I assisted Tamala at Red Clay cafe. I choose the specials for the first two weeks of school, I really enjoyed having the freedom to make a managerial decision. On Wednesday I shadowed Chris at Barberitos which is located in the Tate Center.

Thursday we took a field trip to Zaxby's corporate office. I found this very interesting, we toured with Chef Paul's wife who works in R&D at corporate. We did a taste testing for new gravy's that they would be selling at different Zaxby's locations. We also toured one of the Athens Zaxby's and got to eat lunch there. Friday we did banquet prep and did all the flower arrangements.