Week 7
Every year at the University of Wyoming, the dining staff puts on a number of theme dinners. The most famous one is the beach party. They have been doing the beach party every year for a long time. We heard all about it when we got here, but I did not realize how big of a tradition it was until we started on our projects. This week we were in charge of planning all of the dinners for the whole year. Olivia and I split up our idea list we made to come up with menus, entertainment, and decorations for each dinner. The themes we came up with were, Welcome to Wyoming (they always do this one), Beach Party, Around the World-Olympics (since it is an Olympic year next year), Mardi Gras, There's no place like Washakie (Wizard of Oz theme), Day of the Dead, Lumberjack breakfast, Road trip, and Winner Winner Chicken Dinner (Casino Night). We made a packet for each dinner full of a menu and the rest of our ideas and presented them to Becce. We also did a lot of research on Wyoming because this year the Welcome to Wyoming dinner is going to be a throwback theme. Olivia made a bunch of trivia questions to also add to the entertainment and help acquaint the new students with the school and the state. We also came up with a list of Event ideas for them to put on for the students during the year. After completing our dinners, we came up with different tasting and culinary demonstration ideas to engage and educate the new students coming in the fall in a fun way.
The box of pictures we had to look through.
Our dinner packets before presenting to Becce.
We also got to tour the campuses meat lab one day! We met with the manager Kelcey and he showed us around the whole place. They do not do production in the summer so we did not get to see any meat actually being processed, but it was still really cool to see all of the equipment. It was crazy to hear how much some of the equipment costs! It was over 100,000 for a hot dog stuffing machine! The facility was also extremely clean. Their facility even sells meat to local consumers, which I thought was pretty cool. It was also fun to hear some of the stories about goats and other animals getting out so they had to go chase them down on campus.
On Thursday, we met with Eric who is the big cheese here in Resident Life and Dining in Washakie. At the university, Resident Life and Dining are combined. Eric said it is not like this at every university he has worked with, but he said it works well here and is probably due to the smaller student body at Wyoming compared to schools he's worked at in the past. It was really cool to see some of the numbers and how Washakie compares to retail when it comes to expenses and sales. Eric also told us some more about his daily duties and how he ended up in this position which was really cool.
We finished out the week working on a PowerPoint for Welcome to Wyoming! We went through hundreds of old pictures of Washakie to put in the PowerPoint. It was pretty cool to see how everything has changed over the years. This was when I realized how big of a tradition the beach party was! There are pictures from back in the 80s that have people building sand castles, racing motorboats, and dancing on a wooden dance floor at the dance party. Every year we looked at included one thing for sure, pictures with Lobsters! It is a tradition at the beach party to have lobster every year. Everyone definitely enjoys it!
Over the weekend, we enjoyed the Laramie Jubilee Days! This is a large festival they have for a week every summer. We got to explore the farmers market and even see a rodeo! On Sunday, we went and explored Rocky Mountain National Park. We have been wanting to go here for a while. We may have gotten a little lost along the way, but it was still awesome and we even got to see a waterfall!
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