Link internship is a 3 week long break from our classes to reach out and get an experience that will help us on our post high school goals. my internship was to intern with the head chef at our local soup kitchen where i would help people and learn to cook food. my mentor for my internship was Seanan Culloty who was a head chef at man fancy restaurants around town before going to manna to do what he loves while helping people. I spent a lot of time learning about how kitchens work, proper food handeling, and how to cook.
|
Link Project
My link project was to create a list for closing and running the kitchen of everything that needs to be done for my mentors to use with future interns allowing them more space and less stress when dealing wiht volunteers. |
My link internship was very similar to jobs i've worked in the past so i had basic skills in a kitchen and handling food. I knew how to properly act in a kitchen when dealing with foods like keeping raw meat away from things and wearing/changing gloves. The skills that proved most useful was my basic knowledge and allowing my mentor to teach me more about cooking instead of the layout of a kitchen.
However there were a lot more skills I needed to learn when it comes to running a kitchen and during the course of my internship I had to learn how to manage my time in a way that worked best for me and allowed me to not feel overwhelmed. The first week and a half were very rough. I was getting out late because I wasn't finishing my job on time and didn't plan my brakes well. And was overall a mess so my mentors thought of an idea of a project that would help me and clay through our internship and continue to help our mentors with future interns/ volunteers. We created closing lists for daily things and different days of the week that me and Clay would then execute for the last week of our internship. Allowing our mentors to take a break from mentoring and put the fate of the kitchen into me and clays hands. At first me and Clay were struggling to finish the lost= by ourselves and always needed our mentors to check if we were done but we figured out a way to manage the work between the two of us in order to feel less stressed and make sure we get everything done. We also planned our breaks around when the other volunteers would leave so we could get back and close the kitchen without dealing with other people. I don't think I would need to argue that my and clay were useful to our mentors as they were very appreciative of the work we did and me and clay could see the amount of stress we relieved these two of for 3 weeks. We allowed them to not worry about the kitchen and deal with personal business as well as helping other people around the building.They were very sad to see us go and i don't think there would be any problem having more highschool interns at manna soup kitchen. Going into college and life after high school I'll have no idea what I'm interested in and cooking has always been fun for me so this internship gave me a taste of what it's like being a chef and not going to school just being in the kitchen. Having my mentor be a well known chef around town helps me a lot when looking for a high school job as he wrote both me and my friend clay letters of recommendation that could take me far places if i used them correctly. Overall it was a valuable experience and I'm glad to have been a part of it while also reaching out and helping my local community. |