After graduating last year, MPH Program ’19 alumna Andreina Martin joined Cornell’s Dietetic Internship Program in the Division of Nutritional Sciences. She’s been immersed in community and clinical nutrition ever since, practicing her skills with Foodnet Meals on Wheels, and then with Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY. Since the coronavirus pandemic broke out across New York State in March, Andreina’s work has shifted entirely to working with COVID-19 patients and their families.

Cornell’s Dietetics Internship Program is split between a community nutrition rotation, a clinical rotation, and an integrated research concentration. This past fall, Andreina worked with Foodnet Meals on Wheels, helping to provide food and nutrition consultations to elderly people enrolled. In this role, she says, she applied many of the skills she learned in the MPH Program working closely with community organizations like Ithaca City School District’s meal programs and Cornell Cooperative Extension. Like her work with the Universal Breakfast Program and Summer Meals, she says “it was still about getting free food to people in need on a daily basis.”

This spring, working with the hospital, she’s learning about how nutrition and dietetics “fit in” with different medical specialties. In April, she started an Intensive Care Unit rotation; in the new era of physical distancing, she’s able to conduct online nutrition consultations with ICU patients, as well as their family members. All the patients she works with in the ICU are infected with COVID-19; if a patient is diabetic, for example, Andreina asks the family members questions about the patient’s dietary history and be able to make more informed tube feed recommendations to the medical team.

One of the most valuable skills Andreina honed as an MPH student was how to work effectively with interdisciplinary and interprofessional teams—as a dietitian-in-training this past year, she has worked in collaboration with social work students, an executive director, kitchen staff, and food production workers, and then with patients, doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff, and well as with Registered Dietitians.

With graduation from the Dietetics program approaching, Andreina is looking for work that combines public health and nutrition. Eventually, Andreina wants to purse a PhD—“in something!”