Hello! I’m Rachel, dietetic intern from Minnesota. In my internship so far, I have completed my clinical nutrition management, patient services, clinical, food service management, and some of my community hours. Soon, I will be finishing with my concentration of leadership, long term care, and more community hours. This picture is of me in my food service management rotation. However, I am going to share some of my takeaways from other rotations.
During my clinical rotations, I most enjoyed getting to know patient stories and interesting medical histories. I also loved charting. So far, I feel that this is where I had the most growth as a future RD. From starting with providing diet education to providing nutrition support recommendations in the ICU, these are skills you can only develop in the dietetic internship. There were overwhelming moments for sure, but after completing staff relief and thinking back to my first week, it was cool that the progress I made was very evident. I rotated within two hospitals and worked in various units such as cardiac, med-surg, GI, ICU, behavioral health, substance abuse, etc. I found that the variety and the challenge always kept it interesting and made the days fly by.
At this point in time, the highlight of my internship has been completing some community hours with an inpatient eating disorder center in a hospital setting. I was able to learn the role of an RD in assessing patients with eating disorders, providing appropriate nutrition, and assisting with mealtimes. In addition, I was able to observe how the interdisciplinary team members worked closely together. I have an interest working in this area of dietetics. Therefore, this experience was useful for me to gain insight into a day in the life of an eating disorder RD. Now that I have learned about treatment in a hospital setting, I have further interest in seeing residential and outpatient settings as well. The flexibility of setting up your own community and concentration hours has allowed me to experience this.
The next rotation I will complete is for my concentration, leadership. In my leadership rotation, I will explore a non-traditional RD role as part of a research and development team at a food production company. I am excited to work next to food scientists and participate in recipe development and social media.
Some tips I have for incoming dietetic interns are:
During my clinical rotations, I most enjoyed getting to know patient stories and interesting medical histories. I also loved charting. So far, I feel that this is where I had the most growth as a future RD. From starting with providing diet education to providing nutrition support recommendations in the ICU, these are skills you can only develop in the dietetic internship. There were overwhelming moments for sure, but after completing staff relief and thinking back to my first week, it was cool that the progress I made was very evident. I rotated within two hospitals and worked in various units such as cardiac, med-surg, GI, ICU, behavioral health, substance abuse, etc. I found that the variety and the challenge always kept it interesting and made the days fly by.
At this point in time, the highlight of my internship has been completing some community hours with an inpatient eating disorder center in a hospital setting. I was able to learn the role of an RD in assessing patients with eating disorders, providing appropriate nutrition, and assisting with mealtimes. In addition, I was able to observe how the interdisciplinary team members worked closely together. I have an interest working in this area of dietetics. Therefore, this experience was useful for me to gain insight into a day in the life of an eating disorder RD. Now that I have learned about treatment in a hospital setting, I have further interest in seeing residential and outpatient settings as well. The flexibility of setting up your own community and concentration hours has allowed me to experience this.
The next rotation I will complete is for my concentration, leadership. In my leadership rotation, I will explore a non-traditional RD role as part of a research and development team at a food production company. I am excited to work next to food scientists and participate in recipe development and social media.
Some tips I have for incoming dietetic interns are:
- Find your individual way that helps you stay organized early on. – I wish I would have prioritized this in the beginning so I would have felt less chaos.
- Set personal due dates for your assignments. – When spending 8 hours a day working on site, it was easy for me to put my assignments on the back burner.
- Take some time to think about settings you would potentially want to work in and seek those out where possible (ex: community or concentration). – This may give you direction when you start to look for jobs.
