Week 7 @ OU!

Monday we started off with Lauren who is in charge of community experience, which is ran through the marketing department. She deals with making a community experience with the faculty and staff within housing and food service. She has such a creative mind. She has a group called the EAC. They are a group of volunteers that think of ways to train individuals and ways to get people involved within the department. They want to help everyone succeed in anything that they are doing. The staff and faculty have so many resources available to them and they may not know of all that is available and that is what this group of people is there for to help them. She is also working on a project that helps with their training  program for their student workers so we worked with prezi which is another form of power point. It is so awesome and so different in the way that you can present a project. These students get to come in earlier and get moved in so they miss out on the tours and all of that of the school so they are trying to implement that to them before they have to start working. Lauren is full of ideas and projects that she wants to do, but her main job and where all of her ideas go to is helping housing a food succeed and become a closer community with themselves. For a quick example the just desserts that we judged a couple weeks back was one of their ideas to help bring people together and have a good time

After lunch we met with Rayanna. She is considered the program coordinator. She deals with the RA’s which are located in the resident halls. It is a different part of catering. She also helps with the fers which again are the faculty that live in the resident halls to help students. If any of these groups of people need food they go through her to order it. During the summer she is working on fixing the menu for them to order off of. They are not restricted to this menu they can have other things as well. She one year had them order a full pig and they roasted it. They also ordered craw fish as well one time which was not on the menu. She does cake ball classes and cupcake decorating classes as well since the students seemed really interested in this idea. It is easy for them to do in their dorm room by buying the supplies and buying already made cupcakes that are not frosted

Tuesday and Wednesday we were at crossroads with April. We learned a lot in this location. She is a great manager and one that everyone should learn from. We learned how she figures out the cost of her foods and how she makes sure she is making the most profit on her foods that she can with keeping the food cost reasonable. She is planning to raise some of her food prices other wiser her food percentage is too high. She also taught us how she schedules her employees which seem pretty easy then some of the ways I have seen it done. She puts in all the times that they can’t work due to school and then when they want to work and schedules from there so that she cannot schedule over time that they are not available. She also showed us all of the different reports that she pulls to make sure she is on the right track which really helps her make the most money out of what she has. We also talked about how she has specials and we helped make some new ones. They want to have specials of the day. They have a small space to work in for how much they make each day but they keep it clean and as organized as possible. They are the only operation that is open 24 hours. We were curious if this was a good idea or not. She put us in our place and it is a fabulous idea. They have to have security guards on duty Thursday, Friday and Saturday from a couple hours for the people who are coming back from parties. They make money all day long the business that comes in is pretty steady the only time that is dead is from 3am to 6am and at this time the prep for the next day. They actually make themselves shorter in all other shifts so that they can have a couple of more people on to get the day ready for everyone. Very well ran operation. She also is in charge of another operation which is bed rock. It is a one man operation and is in the basement of one of the buildings here on campus. This lady is all by herself every day. I don’t know how she does it

On Thursday we met with the registered dietitian on campus her name is Dr. Patty Landers. We have been so excited to meet with her because she is in one of the positions we have thought of being in. She is a professor as well as she sees patients daily. She is so knowledgeable in her field it was astounding all the information she filled our minds with. She explained to us how she works the dietetics program here at OU and me and her compared what I do at ASU then here and then same with Grace hers was different then both of ours. Dr. Landers is a part of so many organizations and committees I don’t know how she keeps them all straight but she is one smart Dr. She told us what all that she does how being part of committees works into being a dietitian in a doctor’s office as well as teaching classes. One interesting thing that we learned was that when she was getting her PhD she studied rice. Who would ever know lol. She worked on that for awhile.

On Friday we met with one of the mangers by the name of TJ. She is in charge of two franchise stores Quiznos and Chik- fil- a. Then she has one that is the universities invention which is called the laughing tomato. She explained to us how it is so different to have a franchise places to handle and a non franchise. She has her employees move around to each location which helps with her labor. She goes by the book pretty much for the franchise ones but can use her imagination for the laughing tomato. She was very nervous to do a non franchise store because she has never done it before. It took about two years to get it to what she wanted and for her to make a good deal of money. It has been a huge success and they want to paten the idea.