The Clinical Chronicles

By: Rachel Coury

If you asked me a year ago what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said “a community dietitian working to prevent childhood obesity.” But as I continue to move through different rotations in my internship, I’m realizing that there are a lot of different career paths out there that I could see myself following. It’s one of the perks of doing an internship that exposes you to many different areas in the field ;)

One of these newly coveted paths is clinical dietitian. I’m currently in my second week of my clinical rotation and loving it! And yes classmates I can hear your “I told you so’s” from here. You see, in the weeks approaching the start of my clinicals I may have been a tad on the anxious/nervous-wreck/annoying everyone in sight side. I asked my fellow interns who had already completed this rotation how they survived and if they always knew the answers to their patients’ problems. I thought it was going to be overwhelming and that I would feel inadequate. But as my first week in the hospital progressed, something great happened; I realized I was really enjoying myself! Sure it is overwhelming at first, but my preceptors remembered how it felt to be an intern and assured me its normal to feel like that. And yes there are a lot of things I don’t know, but it is rewarding and exciting to learn something new everyday. I feel like I’m really on the road to becoming a dietitian and am so thankful for this experience. So life lesson learned: don’t stress out about the unknown because it can be a pleasant surprise.