A trio of prospective dietitians have brightened an Armidale office for the past month.
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Newcastle University's Carly Denz and Cathy Fingleton joined University of Queensland student Zoe Selby to learn about the real world applications of their chosen career under the guidance of dietitian Anna Hicks at Armidale HealthWISE.
"It's really interesting to see the different personalities that come through when it comes to each year and each group of students," Anna said.
The Newcastle pair, who are nearing the end of their Nutrition Dietetics bachelor degrees, embraced the opportunity to take their knowledge further as part of their community placements.
"It's been a great experience seeing how a community organisation works. I'd love to get into some kind of community aspect," Cathy said.
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A former chef, Cathy moved to Australia from Ireland 11 years ago. She treasured the opportunity to take on a placement in the country, and said it was a brilliant way to see more of Australia.
For Carly, the Armidale placement opened her eyes to the possibilities.
"It's made me realise that it's an area that I want to work in. Getting out into the community and educating people has been really fun and I think that's something that I would love to do more of, especially working in rural areas," Carly said.
"I can see myself heading in that direction after having this experience - which I kind of never thought that I would before."
Zoe has enjoyed the opportunity to stretch herself as she prepares to follow up a Bachelor of Health Science majoring in Nutrition with a Masters of Dietetics.
"The point of this placement is kind of to see if what you want to do is in that field, so it's definitely concreted for me that I do want to pursue that career," Zoe said.
The flexible nature of the professional development placement has seen Zoe take on a wide range of challenges, from preparing meal plans and teaching youngsters about the relationship between food and mood to writing blog posts to inform HealthWISE's social media audience about the dos and don'ts of eating.
"Anna's been really good. I like that she's given me a range of things to do," she said.
The trio agreed that their favourite project was visiting Minimbah Preschool to promote healthy eating to students and staff. It was the first opportunity HealthWISE had to connect with the tiny school.
"Carly made them a nice place mats. I made puppets with my three-year-olds," Cathy said.
The girls worked together to teach the youngsters about the core food groups, help teachers and parents feed picky eaters and check the school's strengths and weaknesses in their food and exercise education.
"We used a government checklist to see where the preschool already were in terms of education and what guidelines they were following and where they needed a little help, and then we made some resources to make it easier for them to encourage the kids," Cathy said.
"It was a nice fresh project to do, improving the nutritional outcomes for three and four year old kids."
"Engaging with the kids has been my favourite part of the experience," Carly said.
Anna was thrilled to watch the students use their expertise to reach a school she normally wouldn't have the chance to interact with. She said most community groups her students worked with had very positive experiences.
She valued the opportunity to learn from the students' up-to-date research and felt the placements were positive on both sides.
The trio agreed. Zoe enjoyed watching Anna in her professional element at a dementia patient carer support group, while Cathy felt she'd remained supportive and easy-going, giving the group direction without micromanaging them.
"She's been great. I can see how engaged she is in the community here in Armidale and she's provided us really good direction and given us really good advice," Carly said.