My Challenge

As a dietetic intern, I am assigned projects, tasks, and roles daily that challenge me to learn; learn about specific techniques and methods in dietetics, learn different methods of teaching, and learn new things about myself. So when I was challenged by a former professor of mine, who is also currently one of my internship advisers, to officially document - or reflect, if you will - upon my experiences and learnings in my internship, it stirred up feelings of excitement and anticipation within me. In my 3rd year at Acadia, I was in this prof's Leadership class and had a semester-long assignment to continually reflect on my daily experiences - this was a project I took great pride in and enjoyed thoroughly! So when I was told that I had creative freedom with this assignment as I did with my Leadership class's reflection assignment, to the web I went! A devote reader of Weighty Matters a blog written by a physician and Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Ottawa, Yoni Freedhoff, I jumped at the chance to create a blog of my own through which to share my experiences as a dietetic intern. Additionally, my hope is to incorporate articles and videos I come across that may interest fellow "nutrition-ees". 

So where am I presently in my internship?

I have just completed my 5th of 12 weeks in my Public Health (PH) rotation at the Yarmouth Regional Hospital. So far my major projects and assignments have consisted of attending and preparing food for a couple prenatal classes using recipes from Strive for 5 (Pepita Pumpkin Bread is a winner!) and researched nutrition/ingredient information for foods served in child care settings to ensure that the NS Child Care Regulations are followed. Additionally, I researched and presented information on Nutrition for Childbearing to a 3rd year nursing class from Dalhousie University at the Yarmouth Campus. That experience was a great learning opportunity which I will go into shortly. I frequently divide my time amongst meetings for everything I can wiggle my way into: Baby Friendly Initiative (branching from this committee is the sub-committee of Make Breastfeeding Your Business in which I helped plan, promote, and execute a World Breastfeeding Week celebration event, which according to the botched radio announcement by rushed announcers offered "free breastfeeding activities". It is a wonder we got people to show up at all.), Group of 9 Tobacco Strategy, Active Transport, Healthy Communities, and Health Promoting Schools (and more specifically in this area, the School Food and Nutrition Policy). I have found it quite beneficial and interesting to chat with other Public Health employees besides the PH Nutritionists whom I work with daily one-on-one. These such professionals include PH nurses, a dental hygienist, communicable disease control nurses, home visitors, lactation consultants, and many others. 

Next on my list to discuss, that presentation I gave on Nutrition for Childbearing. I've had more successful presentations in my career as a student:

I spent weeks preparing for this presentation as I was terrified of presenting out-of-date or inaccurate, vague, or incomplete information. I received an outline from the professor of the class on what I was to include in my presentation focusing on nutrition for pregnancy and for breastfeeding. Now, I learned a great deal from researching the content, but the bulk of my learning came from getting feedback from the PH Nutritionists and Prenatal Nurse/Lactation Consultant on my PowerPoint presentation and speaker notes. Giving presentations in university seemed to be straight forward to me - give a lot of detailed information and present in a way that my peers could understand, learn from, and easily follow. Well, the latter was consistent with presenting on behalf of PH, but the former not-so-much. Without being able to gauge how much prior nutrition knowledge the nursing students had, I was forced to limit the information I was presenting, while still providing nutrient specifics for those who will be working in maternity. Furthermore, I had no clue as to what could and couldn't be present in the presentation. For instance, the mere mention of formula was quickly removed to abide by the World Health Organization (WHO) code of breastfeeding that basically goes like this: only promote breastfeeding - do not speak of any alternate sources of infant feeding. For interest sake, here is the link to the actual code from the WHO's website. Also, pacifiers are a no-no (I had an image of a cartoon baby with a pacifier in her mouth that had to be removed). Those were a pretty eye-opening learning experiences but definitely beneficial ones. The length of my presentation was set for 2-hours which is a VERY long time to fill. So it was necessary for me to incorporate many group activities and do my best to facilitate participation to keep the students awake. This proved quite difficult as getting the students to speak during my presentation and answer my questions was like trying to co-hearse a mule to move by politely asking him questions. Futile effort! But eventually I was successful in getting a couple of the students to speak (I resorted to bribing them with the promise of a prize in the form of a dollar-store pencil), but needless to say, the class ended 30 mins early. Le sigh. Perhaps in a few months I'll be able to better facilitate conversation or ad-lib information to fill empty air - something to work on. Feedback I received from a few of the nursing students in that class was quite positive though - two even stated that the class is usually very quiet so I did a good job getting them to speak at all. If only I had known, I wouldn't have stressed so much that day (and days following) about my inability to induce discussion. But it was a very good learning experience from every angle - I definitely recommend future interns diving in head-first with this experience!

I have been working on much more, but will save that for another day. To close, here is one of my favorite quotes:

“To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.” ~ La Rochefoucauld