Reflections after my first week
So, today is Sunday and I have finished my first week of my first Internship!
Starting at every work place always requires time to learn, adjust and understand how the things function. Therefore, this week I spent a lot of time following, observing and learning how KOHAOF runs and functions. This introduction time has really helped me to have a better understanding and gave me a base for coming up with new ideas how am I going to fulfill my learning objectives.
Learning Objectives. What and How?
As described in my first blog post, KOHAOF is a newly established restaurant, with a purpose of health promotion. As I thought that my educational background could be really valuable for the restaurantās success in different aspects, I came up with the internship idea and offered it to the owners myself. After discussing with them and my internship supervisor I came up with 4 different learning objectives that match my background and KOHAOFās needs. I am going to do many tasks in relation to: nutrition, health, well-being and food habits; health promotion and diseases prevention and pedagogy and health education strategies. But letās look at it from a closer perspective!
Learning how to calculate the nutrition of meals that are prepared in high quantities.
This learning objective is closely related to what I have learned in Module 2 (Nutrition, Physiology and Biochemisty) and Module 3 (Quantitative approaches to diet ad disease). In order to perform it I have come up with the key strategies:
Follow the ordering process and choice of the products used in the recipes, make their nutritional evaluation.
Follow the process of preparing the recipes.
Calculate the nutrition of items offered on the menu, evaluate nutrient change regarding preparation process.
These calculations are going to be used on the menu card in the restaurant in order to provide the customers with the nutrition content of the meals.
Creating and implementing educational messages while using the knowledge of nutrition, health promotion and disease prevention, and using it as a tool to market the place.
This learning objective relates to module 4,5,6 where I was taught about lifestyle change theories, educational theories, planning and communication. The key strategies for this is:
Create attractive videos, pictures, presentations, texts related to the health benefits of food offered in the restaurant.
Promote these messages on social media of the restaurant.
Learn the tools to achieve the best possible publicity and respondence rate to these messages.
Learning how such young restaurant business with a concept of health promotion is being managed, what it takes to make business to settle down, what obstacles it faces and how they are tackled.
Here are the key strategies that I am going to use for this learning objective:
Observe and get to know how everything functions in the restaurant, take notes and give feedback to supervisor and manager.
Follow the tools used to make restaurant successful.
Observe and investigate the health promotion obstacles, research possible ways to tackle it or introduce new.
At the end of the internship, the final report on my observations on what I perceive to be the restaurantās strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and any other areas of improvement, especially in regards of health concept promotion strategies.
Learning how to engage various companies and people in health communication.
The key strategies for this is:
Investigate and research to what certain target groups the healthful food provided at the restaurant could be beneficial to.
Prepare scientifically argued projects about that.
Reach out to certain contact persons, representatives of a target group, present the idea of the benefits of certain food we could offer to the target group.
Create events, social media posts, etc. with them where food in the restaurant could be introduced and promoted.
So, that was just a little introduction about what am I going to do in my internship, what are my main learning objectives f and the key strategies for their fulfillment. What is interesting, that already after a week of participating, learning and observing the companies life, I can see way more perspectives and angles that could be worked on! I am extremely excited for the knowledge and experience I can build on! But now it is time to work on them and come up with the fruits in the following post!