For the first week of my DI, I had an “Orientation to the DI” class. Sounds nice and easy, right? Nope! Essentially, our orientation class is designed to get all of us on the same page for our clinical rotations. It’s basically like your entire Medical Nutrition Therapy (MNT) class in 5 days. Because of how intense it is they’ve affectionately nicknamed it boot camp.
A typical day for me this week looked like this:
7:00am: wake up and get ready for the day
8:00am: leave for class (I live about 45-60 minutes away from Loyola campus)
9:30am-12:30pm: Boot Camp
1:30pm-2:00pm: arrive home and eat lunch
2:00pm-5:00pm: study, study, study
5:00pm-5:30pm: eat dinner
5:30pm-11:00pm: just keep studying, just keep studying…
Each day we had about 15 medications to learn. This included their name, commercial name, function, diet-related side effects or contraindications—do not discount these in your MNT class!! Then we had 3 chapters of medical terminology (~50 words to memorize per chapter). After that, an additional about 50 abbreviations to memorize. We were quizzed on them the following morning and had a new set to learn for a quiz the next day (quizzes Tuesday-Friday morning). In addition, we had calculation worksheets to complete (anthropometrics, enteral and parenteral feedings, estimated calorie needs, etc.), PES statements to write, lab values and functions to look up for about 25 different indicators (BUN, Mg, etc.), and oral supplements worksheets to complete.
All of this culminated to our mock interviews on Friday where we acted as the RDN for a standardized patient. We took a diet, social and weight history, performed a 24-hour recall (which I luckily had practice doing in undergrad), and perform a nutrition focused physical assessment. After our encounter the standardized patient gave us feedback on our interpersonal skills. Then, we wrote an ADIME note like we would if we were an RDN in a hospital. All of it was, in a word, intense. If you match to Loyola, or if your program has a class like this—do everything that you can early, if possible! I moved to Illinois the weekend before my class, so I didn’t have much time to get a head start. I was able to get through about one chapter of medical abbreviations, and even that helped immensely.
Part of page 6/8 of the medications I had to research and memorize.
On Wednesday, we also had our orientation for our school-based public health nutrition site: Proviso East High School. We’ll be writing recipes for their Lunch Bunch Program and designing and leading nutrition education sessions (both during Lunch Bunch and their freshman health classes). We’ll also have the opportunity to participate in Proviso’s Wellness Committee. It was cool to see the nutrition interventions being implemented at Proviso and I’m excited to participate in them!
The community garden building at Proviso with murals painted by students.
Since it’s Labor Day weekend, I drove to Minnesota to spend some time with my family and my pup, Maggie. It’s a decently long drive(~6.5 hours), especially by yourself after a crazy week, so I kept myself entertained with some podcasts from Eat Right Radio. I spent most of my weekend relaxing and getting in some much needed sleep. Your work as a dietetic intern is never done though… Over the weekend, I completed about 5 hours of online biomedical ethics training to prepare for my research rotation. I also prepped for my weekly Wednesday night class. On Tuesday I’ll be starting my supervised practice at Loyola’s bariatric hospital, so stay tuned for my post next week where I’ll be talking about the first week of my supervised practice!