Throughout my undergraduate career at Rutgers I have completed several projects related to the field of dietetics.
Sophomore Year
Quantity Food Production
During the Fall of 2015, my Quantity Foods project was to select different recipes and prepare them at one of the dining halls for faculty and staff. Since our project landed on the day before Halloween, we decided to make our meals Halloween themed. Through this project I was able to learn about meal planning, ingredient purchasing, recipe costing, and foodservice. Feel free to click on the flyer to view the powerpoint presentation that our group created.
Management of Food Service Systems
The following spring semester I had another group project where we needed to create a restaurant from scratch. We had to decide on the location, target population, restaurant theme and design, as well as the recipes to name a few aspects of the project. I learned about the importance of researching the demographics of a location before deciding where to locate your restaurant as well as learning how to budget and schedule employees. Menu psychology was also important when we created our menu. If you would like to view our menu please click on the picture.
Junior Year
Life Span Community Nutrition
Last fall I had 2 group projects to complete. The first one was to complete a community assessment. I learned about the importance of properly assessing the need in the community and relating it to surrounding communities. We needed to be able to put the situation of our assigned town, be it the poverty level, unemployment, or other details, and to apply the information in the proper context as it related to the state and county. Attached is our groups community assessment for Manville, New Jersey.
The second project we had to complete was preparing a grant proposal. In the field of community nutrition, it is essential to have funding in order to implement outreach programs. However, to ensure funding, you need to have evidence to support the program that you want to implement. The field of nutrition constantly emphasizes the importance of evidence-based practice. With this assignment our group needed to research effective programs that we could use as models and implement a detailed plan to help one of the most at-risk population in Manville, New Jersey.
This semester our project is to focus on a specific condition or population that is affected by a dietary restriction. My lab partner and I decided to focus on lactose-intolerance since the majority of the population develops some form of lactose-intolerance as they age. We are currently writing a research paper that demonstrates our results when we replaced the whole milk in the naan recipe with lactose-free alternatives such as Lactaid, soy milk, and coconut milk.