Interns Madison Vale and Katie Glover are changing the way students, parents, and prospective families view URI’s vast menu options

KINGSTON, R.I. – Nov. 20, 2025 – Two University of Rhode Island Dining Services interns are revamping the department’s dormant YouTube channel, creating food-related content tasty enough to whet any viewer’s appetite.

Senior Katie Glover and junior Madison Vale have already begun reviving the channel, which was created in early 2020 and served as a valuable resource during the COVID-19 pandemic with recipes and cooking tips while students quarantined on campus. The latest video posted to the channel is the first of several dining halls tours, hosted by Glover and Vale, which offer viewers an inside look at meal options and specials served daily at URI.

Glover and Vale envision the channel becoming a go-to hub for students, parents, and prospective URI families who want to know everything there is to know about dining on campus. The prospective student angle is an important one; Dining Services director Pierre St-Germain and graphic designer Stacey Macedo approached their interns about using the platform to draw students to the university based on the myriad dining options, Dining’s ability to meet all students’ dietary needs, and its role in creating a more environmentally-sustainable campus.

In addition to its role as a promotion tool, social media is also vital in connecting Dining to its customers, a.k.a. the students. Student food reviews at dining halls and Instagrammable “foodie” experiences (unorthodox flavor combinations or viral food trends, for example) have forced dining staff nationwide to pay closer attention to consumer feedback.

“We look at all our reviews and posts about our dining halls. The feedback from students is important,” said Vale, a New York native studying public relations who has been working for Dining since her freshman year. “We talk about it during meetings and we use their feedback online to improve what we’re doing and make sure everything we’re producing is top quality for all students.

“We also have a lot of dining hall events that we want to advertise, too, to show that we do more than just serve food daily. We try to make it special and engaging for students and the staff.”

“Before YouTube, it was hard for a parent or student to go to a certain dining hall and know what they’re going to get,” said Glover, a New Jersey-based film major in her first semester as a Dining intern who handles the post-production editing on their film projects. “With our videos, they’ll be able to say, ‘Okay, you have this,’ or, ‘You have that,’ and it’s easier to understand what we offer.”

The channel will feature original content including recipe tutorials and exhibitions to showcase Dining’s talented staff, including a recent Iron Chef-inspired “cook-off” between St-Germain and new chef manager Benjamin Blodgett designed to inform students of the available meal options at Mainfare Dining Hall’s Fusion station via Grubhub. Pierre cooked shrimp fried rice while Blodgett prepared a chicken pasta dish, both available for students through their meal plan swipes, Dining Dollars, or Ram Account.

Glover and Vale said they’ve drawn inspiration from other schools’ YouTube channels and are planning more fun, interactive videos that can also be repurposed on the department’s Instagram and TikTok accounts, which they also manage.

“TikTok and Instagram is more like our target market – people our age,” Vale said, “but YouTube is good because it provides a platform for parents or prospective families who want to see longer, more detailed videos.”

“We post a lot on TikTok. We get like a lot of likes on our TikToks because we follow a lot of the trends,” Glover added, “but we’re hoping that posting shorter clips of our videos from YouTube will help advertise it and generate interest in that channel, too.”

Another key initiative is keeping the community informed about Dining’s sustainability efforts; the department teamed with the university’s Student Action for Sustainability club last spring to launch a post-consumer food recovery project that yielded more than 30,000 pounds of compost. Post-consumer food is anything students throw away instead of eating. Until last spring, the university had only participated in pre-consumer composting, notably food scraps from kitchens that aren’t served to students.

Since 2018, St-Germain has been a strong advocate for building a food service on campus; his efforts have tripled food production at URI’s Greene H. Gardiner Crops Research Center, which now grows food specifically for Dining Services and the Free Farmer’s Market and Rhody Outpost, both of which provide food for students in need. Glover and Vale are tasked with bringing these initiatives to life and keeping the community informed through social media. Their long-term goal is to build a platform that will continue to thrive once they graduate no matter who’s charge.

As for short-term goals, think Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, the popular Food Network series hosted by Guy Fieri, with a URI twist – the possibilities are endless with Glover and Vale bringing their creativity to the table.

“When you scroll down on our TikTok account and see where we started, we’ve come a long way since then,” Vale said. “Over the years, I’ve realized how much thought really goes into the students’ food. People think that when you’re serving a mass amount of people, they don’t really care about it, but our staff really cares about serving the students here and making sure the food is good quality.”

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Michael Parente, director of communications and marketing in the URI Division of Student Affairs, wrote this news release.