Morning, everyone!
I’m going to hold off on my Healthy Living Summit recaps for another day to share a little bit about what I’m up to for my final dietetic internship, which starts this morning! For those who are new readers, I’ve been working on a Masters of Public Health in Nutrition from UNC-Chapel Hill; I finished the 2 years of in-person coursework in May, moved back to DC, and spent the summer doing my second internship, which was our clinical hospital internship. (Last summer was our first dietetic internship — our community/public health rotation — click on the link to read more about it!)
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Picture from last summer’s internship
And now, I’m getting ready to start my final internship! Unlike most of the RD masters programs, UNC’s program is coordinated, which means you do the internships in tandem with coursework and they help set them up for you. There’s no matching process; you just work with your advisor at UNC to set up your internships. Last summer, they had a set list of places we could intern and they assigned us based on preferences; this summer, for the hospital, they have a bunch of hospitals in NC that they usually work with but will help you to find one out of state if you would rather, hence me being in DC.
This final internship this fall is our capstone experience and it’s really supposed to let us focus in more on what our real interests are; some of my classmates will be continuing with hospital internships, some will be doing another public health/community internship similar to last summer, etc. It’s up to us!
For my final internship, I decided it made sense to work with private practice RD’s who also have a social media/media presence, as this is along the lines of what I want to eventually have going in the future. Luckily for me, I’d met a number of RD’s like this already through my blog! The internship is 10 weeks and most people do it all at one place, but I decided to do 3 different mini-internships to give myself exposure to as many different styles of practice as possible. So here’s what I’m doing!
- Today (August 20) — September 14 (4 weeks total) — interning with Rebecca Scritchfield, a DC-based RD who has a private practice and does a lot with social media as well as media. Rebecca and I first met at the Healthy Living Summit, actually, back in 2010! We’ve kept in touch via Twitter since; I’m excited to see how she’s gotten to where she is today. I’ll be doing a lot of client observation and helping with client assessments, helping with some of her media appearances, learning how she runs her own private practice, etc. Should be fun!
- September 17 — October 9 (3.5 weeks total) — interning with Corporate Wellness Solutions, a corporate wellness company where my friend Heather works! I figured it would be interesting to do something a little different and corporate wellness is certainly increasing in demand over the years. This company is also supposed to be very fun to work for (think standing desks, yoga breaks, and healthy food).
- Take a little bit of time off to get MARRIED!!! Our wedding is October 13. Exciting! Taking a break for the wedding worked out perfectly with doing the three different sites. We’re waiting to go on our real honeymoon until December when things are less crazy, but are planning to go away for a night or two for a “mini moon” the week after the wedding.
- October 22 — November 9 (2.5 weeks total) — interning with Danielle Omar, another DC-area based RD with a private practice as well as a great social media/blog presence. We know each other through Twitter and have exchanged some emails over the years; she works from home and has said we can basically spend the 2.5 weeks filling in the blanks from the other internships — e.g. working on anything I feel like I still need to refine/learn.
Whew! During the 10 weeks of this internship experience, we also are enrolled in a class at UNC and will have various assignments related to it to complete (this was the same over the summer; we had to do a case study, present a journal club, do a quality improvement project, etc. at the hospital). AND… we’ll be writing our masters papers, which we’ll be going down to present in person at UNC on November 28, 29, and 30. On November 30, we are officially DONE! If we want, we can come back for real graduation in December, but we’ll have a little celebration with our department and the school of public health on the 30th.
Off to work I go. Unfortunately I seem to have run myself a bit ragged and now have a bad cold/cough; here’s hoping it goes away soon!
Have a great Monday, friends!
