Come what may?

I am feeling incredibly old today. Old and unsure of what on earth I want to do with my life.

I am getting really good at deciding what I DO NOT want to do, but I foresee this process of elimination business not being the best way to go about this.

So far in my life, I would say this past year has been the best year of my life. Not because it has been particularly good, in fact a very high percentage of the year has been very awful: I got rejected from the Dietetic Internship, my fiancé broke up with me, I’ve experienced several deaths of friends and family, dealt with weight gain and financial struggles, and overall been severely depressed for a significant part of the year.

BUT—as the cliché saying goes, “What does not kill you makes you stronger.”

I feel so much stronger, independent and adaptable now.

A year ago my life plan was: do dietetic internship (preferably down south), probably move back north, get married, working in clinical dietetics, hopefully work in Renal, and then once I had a better understanding of what I wanted to do go back for my masters in a field other than Nutrition that would compliment my practice, perhaps Public Health or Environmental Health, or maybe another Health Science. Who Knows? I also was a really big fan of the American Dietetic Association (ADA). I had served the Massachusetts Student Dietetic Association (MSDA) quite faithfully for the past few years and put a lot of effort into their initiatives to build connections among the Dietetic community, and help lobby for more rights and re-imbursements for dietitians.

And then, I was rejected from everywhere I applied. I was upset, but I had expected it. And although it may sound mean, I was happy that the majority of people did not get internships (the match rate was somewhere around 40% I believe), and know that I was competing against people with their Masters Degrees and years of work experience also made me feel a bit better – I’m young and inexperienced, I still have time!

I did, however, lose a lot of respect for the ADA. How could an organization leave some many people striving to get into the profession out in the cold? The fact that they allow so many people to go to school for dietetics, but then form such a harsh bottle neck for getting into internships just seems so unfair.

Of course, there are plenty of options to do without persay getting your RD (becoming a Registered Dietitian), but there are certainly much more opportunities, and often a higher pay scale with the RD.

On the plus side, I am not getting a bit more experience working, and doing the combined masters/ internship, and gaining all these fun new life experiences.

And in the mean time…. I will continue to try to figure out what the heck I want to do.

So in conclusion, this is a really long way of saying – I expect to have some future blogs dabbling in the various aspects of nutrition that I am considering.

Keep an eye out ; )