For job shadowing yesterday, I shadowed two different
dieticians at Memorial Hospital. I am interested in nutrition and helping
people with their diets so it was interesting to see what being a dietician in
a hospital was like, but I do not think that after seeing their jobs, dietician
is the right job for me. The first dietician that I shadowed working in the ICU
and helped patients who had trauma and very bad injuries. Some of the patients
in that unit had been through car accidents, been burnt very badly, and one man
had fallen off of the top of a ladder. The dietician in this unit helped these
patients by figuring out what kind of diets their body would require so that it
could heal. Mostly they just had to add a lot of protein to their diets so that
any broken bones could heal and it also helped them get stronger and wounds
heal faster. That dietician mostly just walked around the unit, talked to
patients and informed them on what kind of food and nutrients their bodies
needed to heal. The other dietician that I shadowed worked in the oncology unit
of the hospital and sometimes with dialysis patients. Her job was mostly to
make sure that patients were eating while they were in the hospital because
usually these patients lose their appetites. She said that she was not strict
on their diets, she just had to make sure that they were eating. I learned a
lot by job shadowing and I thought that their jobs were very interesting, but
it was not what I imagined that it would be and I do not think that it is
something that I would want as a career. These two dieticians did more in
patient work and I think that I would enjoy out patient work more. Job
shadowing really helped me to realize what I really want to do in the future.
