Out and About

Edinburgh and County Mayo were awesome, but that will be another post for another day when I get around it. In the meantime, we've been staying pretty busy with school and not just the regular run-of-the-mill homework, either. We've been given some great opportunities recently! Like I said in an earlier post (I think), because DIT and Purdue operate on completely different schedules, the class time we're getting here is not sufficient to get full credit for those classes back home. This has caused a few problems for Kayleen and me, especially with our Maternal Dietetics class. The class only meets for one hour a week and we're only in school for twelve weeks, so this is not enough class time to get full credit at Purdue. Because of this, Mary Moloney has worked extremely hard at finding extra things for us to do in order to fulfill our requirements. First, we're doing a joint project on public awareness of the importance of folic acid in pregnancy. Mary created a survey for us to hand out to college aged girls that asks questions pertaining to amounts of recommended folic acid and so on. We want to see how well informed the general public is about folic acid intake. After getting our results, we will put them into a power point and present our findings to the class. Originally, Kayleen and I were going to do some volunteer work in a hospital and do a project based on that, but because of the legal work issues in Ireland, we weren't allowed to work in a hospital. As disappointing as this was, Mary arranged several opportunities for us to observe in a couple of hospitals. This past Monday, Kayleen and I trekked an hour from our house over to Crumlin Children's Hospital and observed the dietitians there. Crumlin is the largest pediatric hospital in Ireland and we were both very impressed with it. I've never had the opportunity to observe clinical dietitians before, so I really enjoyed this. Purdue doesn't offer any kind of clinical experience in their curriculum like DIT does, so this was so exciting for us! We got a general tour of the different wards throughout the hospital, then one of the dietitians on staff took us through the neonatal ward and we looked a several of the babies' feeding records and prescribed formulas. We also got to talk with one diabetes dietitians for a little while. I really really enjoyed all of this and is has definitely given me some things to think about as far as future careers go. This wasn't something I would have considered doing before, but now that I've been able to observe a little bit, it's really peaked my interest and I want to start looking into it.

Today, Jeanine, Monica, Kayleen, and I got to skip a day of classes and head to Athlone for a Meals-on-Wheels conference, all thanks to Mary! She made all of the arrangements for us to miss school and go with her to listen about all the planning and ideas for the MOW program. One of the speakers was a professor/dietitian from DIT who addressed some of the nutritional aspects of the meals and what changes should possibly be made. This part was definitely the most interesting for me. After lunch, Mary dismissed us to go shopping for a little while. :) Besides having to be up at 4:00 AM to catch the train, we had a really great day! It was such fun to have a "day out" and hang out with Mary! She has been so great at arranging all of these outings for us. We're attending some sort of Kellogg's symposium next week and then Kayleen and I are hopefully observing in a maternal hospital in a few weeks! We're staying pretty busy, but it's so nice to break up the monotony of lectures. These types of "outings" are definitely things we wouldn't have the opportunity to do at Purdue, so we're loving it.