Really, when students come into a dining experience,
there's a lot of misconceptions when students come in,
especially for vegetarians, they sometimes only see a salad bar
when there's so much more things that they could be eating.
They just need to really look to see what they have
for on-campus resources.
If anything, they can go talk to the director of the food service
and say, "Hey, I'm a vegetarian and I'm really wondering
what there is available for me."
And a lot of students, from what I've been finding out,
a lot of students just don't do it, either because
they're scared or they just do it on their own, they try and
figure out what they want.
So that's one of the biggest misconceptions vegetarians
students have, once they come on to a campus environment,
and they're just a little confused as to what to do.
Interestingly for me, this is the first of many Master's
theses that have focused on food service and particularly
on a special category of students.
As we have greater interests in students studying abroad, both
American students studying in other countries and students
from other countries coming to the United States of America,
the changes in dietary habits have to be addressed.
One of the joys I have in our graduate program in student
affairs is that we require the Master's thesis.
And to my knowledge, out of the 100 and some Master's
programs in the United States, there are only 2 that
require a Master's thesis.
And I'm joyful when a student has an "Aha!" moment such as
Evan had when the international student came to him, and that
he's translated that "Aha!" moment into some meaningful
activity which has the potential of making a market difference,
not only on this campus, but literally on campuses
elsewhere in the country.
We are always looking for information that will enable us
to feed the students better.
So we get comment cards, those kinds of things, but any kind of
research, specifically to vegetarians, is going to be
useful to us as far as menu planning.
For me professionally this has actually launched, for me,
an investigation for not only myself, but an entire new type
of study because when I was doing all my research I couldn't
find any studies that have been directly on vegetarianism and
higher education and how those two are related.
So that's really launching me into that as far as
my professional.
But for me personally, it's also been helping me out because now
I can assess my own life and how I'm assessing my own
food choices and how my research applies not only to just me,
but to other people.
