I just found out that the university I applied to isn’t giving me any money for academics or band. 4th chair all-region, excellent tryout. No money. 34 ACT. State school. No money. Now that I realize that I’m going to have to pay for college myself, I’m questioning how much I want to be a (doctor, biochemist, chemical engineer, radiologist, etc.). My passion has always been cooking, and I know that cooking schools take money too, but I’m willing to skip first semester this fall to earn a little seed fund for when I would go off to cooking school. And I think I’ve probably missed the application deadline for those schools anyway.
My only decision is this: Do I take the familiar, my parents were both in the medical field, therefore I’m interested -> college -> job as whatever in parentheses above for x years -> retirement, or do I pursue what I’m genuinely interested in? I have no idea how successful I’ll be as a whatever comes after cooking school. As long as it’s enough to where I can live confortably, I’m fine with it.
Does anyone have any experience with different culinary schools, and if so, how easy is it to land a job afterwards? Is it common to go open your own successful restaurant afterwards? I’m perfectly happy working under someone else, but I just want to know if that option will be open.
Definitely, definitely pursue the path that will bring you joy and inspire your passion. You will likely regret not following your true calling if you choose to please others with your decision. We spend the great majority of our adult lives at work. I can’t imagine wanting to spend that time at something that does not bring meaning to your life. Pursue the cooking if you believe that is what you are genuinely interested in. It is never too late to go back to college at a later date if you change your mind.
College will enable you to get any number of jobs. Cooking school will enable you to get a much smaller set of jobs.
I would say to do college first. You could go to cooking school at anytime and get just about the same experience. There is a cooking school nearby and I see people of all ages there. I feel part of the college experience is interacting with all the students and it’ll be a lot easier to do that when you’re the same age as everyone else. You can tailor your college classes towards things that would help you to be a chef. Even if it’s not your major, you can still take things like economics and chemistry which will be useful if you went down the cooking path.
I agree with filmore. You’re how old, 18? Guess what, you don’t need to decide your entire life right now. College can provide a broad education that’s about teaching you to think clearly and communicate effectively (kind of like the Dope, only more so). It’s also a chance to learn a lot about yourself as a person, and what your interests are. I paid for college myself (and grad school), and have no regrets. It’s way too early to funnel yourself into a specific vocational path.
I’ve always had a serious passion for cooking, and from what I can tell, I can hold my own pretty damn well in the kitchen. I had aspirations of being a chef - owning a restaurant, the whole shebang…
Got a chance to sit down and talk to a few chefs and… yeah, I’m a business analyst now
One of them put it to me best:
If you love to cook, don’t do it for a living, because you’ll end up hating it.
And so, I continue to do it because I like to, and not because I “have” to.
I dould disagree with filmore’s advice No offense, but I think I can understand his position. Basically you know that you can pay for college with a loan or something but if you do that you’ll have to spend some very valuable time in your 20’s paying off debts when you could be having fun! Consider where you want to live later on in life. How flexible do you want to be? Do you want to stay in AK or is your area a little bigger? Or maybe you want to live in a city with at least a million people. I would imagine that in larger cities cooking jobs may be easier. I don’t know what your philosophy on life is, but I’ll tell you that being in your early 20’s can be really damn fun if you are prepared to take advantage of it, so don’t waste it! Personally I used to be concerned about how I was going to plan out my career, because there are so many ways it could go wrong or you get screwed. But then I decided that at least for the large bulk of my 20’s I wasn’t going to let my career come first rather my enjoyment. Will I be poor? Probably, but it doesn’t really bother me. If you aren’t afraid to be poor then you can have a lot of fun. Or maybe thats just me because I don’t spend much money and my idea of fun is just making and hanging out with new friends.
But really, it sounds like you like cooking. Doctors have to work brutal hours sometimes and there is much stress involved in becoming a doctor, so if you want to do that, make sure you know that it will be worth it in the end. Sounds to me like you want to be a cook!
No but can you elaborate on your situations, your expectations in the near future? I have recently been going through such things and maybe I can share my thoughts about this. I am 22, though.
I know a guy who was interested in being a cook and he worked in a restaurant. I don’t know if this is a normal thing or what, but he did a little cooking as well. Maybe you could get a job somewhere in a big city or somewhere and try to get a little experience and see what its like.
I’d tell any 18 year old I know to get a job after high school graduation and work 2 years before you start college.
Work in a restaurant for a while. If, in 2 years, you still want to cook, that’s probably what you’re supposed to do.
The next 5 years of your life are going to drastically change you and what you want now may not be what you want when you’re, oh, 23. You don’t have to decide anything today
I have a very close friend from high school who left Drew University in New Jersey to go to CIA (Culinary Institute of America) in Hyde Park, New York - the top cooking school in the United States. Several things to know:
It’s a brutal, brutal experience. 18 hours a day of psychological torture. “Jane” found that the only one of our group of friends who really understood what she was going through was the one at the Naval Academy. Best anecdote, from a poissonerie class. Student screwed up a filet - really screwed it up, to the point where all it was fit for was the stock pot. And it was something expensive, Alaskan wild coho salmon or somesuch. Anyway, the chef picked up one of his larger knives and winged it at the student so that it landed in the wall about an inch from the kid’s head, and announced, “I only miss once.”
That said, most students survive the cooking classes. What does a fair number of them in, though, is the math. Not that it’s very advanced, it’s just that you have to be willing to do it so that you know how to cost a menu, that sort of thing.
Cooking school is often expensive - the better schools can be very much so. Jane ended up with about $25,000 in debt, and that was almost 15 years ago.
The apprenticeship after school is long, exhausting, and exceedingly low-paid. Essentially, Jane spent the next year literally flipping burgers in a swanky hotel.
Restaurants tend not to financially stable. Here in New York, most fail within a year.
Unless you really, really, love cooking, I’d say it’s a field to stay the hell away from. It’s wonderful to become a really good avocational cook, and know food, and prepare it for your family and friends. There are few better ways to show love. But none of that prepares you for the real world of cooking food for people you probably wouldn’t like even if you ever saw them.
With all that - Jane’s had a decent career. But I’m honestly not sure that if she had to do it again she’d have stayed in it, especially since what really seems to interest her is food science, developing formulae for products, etc.
If you promise to stay in your own state I’ll give you some advice. (just kidding)
Ok, so, I’m a caterer. Why? Because I love to cook. No, scratch that, I love to bake, but I hate baker’s hours. As someone said previously, I feel that it’s true that you will never really get to see the person that you are cooking for if you work in a restaurant. But in catering, you are hands-on all the way. I plan the menus, I shop for the groceries, I schlepp the stuff in to the hall, etc., etc. And I love it!
Here’s a few things to consider. What are your motivations? Do you want to be a famous chef? Do you want to own a restaurant? Do you like to do your own thing? And, as someone else mentioned, how much do you like to do math? That’s the most tedious thing for me, costing out menus.
Here’s another option that you might want to try, how about a university with a program in Culinary Arts? For example, I started out in the ‘Community and Technical College’ and got a degree in Hospitality Management/Culinary Arts and then decided to go on for the bachelors in Food Science. That way, if I ever bomb out of catering, I have that famed ‘college degree.’
You could probably make a pretty penny if you opened up a bakery that only made low-carb stuff.
If you can find a way to make a low carb version of most desserts WITHOUT using maltitol (a sugar substitute that causes stomachaches) you’d be golden. The Atkins craze isn’t going to go away.
You could try to kill two birds with one stone… go to hotel school. Cornell has an excellent hotel school. You’ll come out with a degree as well as the credentials to work in the restaurant or hotel field, if that’s what you choose.
My advice is to either go to college and get a broad degree, then do cooking school (Charlie Trotter, for example, has a poli sci degree from Wisconsin), or follow the above advice and pick a university that has a hotel/hospitality degree. As mentioned above, Cornell has a great rep. I know someone at BU who likes it. And don’t ignore those schools just because they’re expensive and you don’t have money. Hell, if you’re qualified (and if your grades match your ACT, you are), you may be financially better off going to an expensive private school. They could conceivably offer you a ton of aid in the form of scholarships/grants. Those schools are looking for diversity, and you think they get a ton of highly-qualified applications from Arkansas at Cornell? I guarantee you you’re in a better position than the kid with the 34 from Westchester.
Personally I would advise flexibility. Just because you start down one route doesn’t mean you can’t choose a different path at a latter date. Certainly going to college and getting a undergrad degree isn’t going to commit you to the medical field.
I can see a couple of different ways you could go. Those 4 or 5 years will really give you a better prespective on who you are and what you would really want to do as well as a degree that will most likely be quite valuable for you to have. Another thought would be to take a year. If you are lucky maybe you could get a job in a kitchen (don’t know what would be in you’re area). Might not pay well and you would mostly start off with menial taskes but you would probably be able to do some prep work or even some actual cooking and would give you a feel for what a professional kichen is like. Even if you can’t get a kitchen job being able to put some money away can be nice.
If you are really interested in professional cooking there has been, in recent years, a decent # of books published by cooks about cooking. It might provide you a good amount of insight into the realities of that kind of life you are contemplating to read a few of them. One excellent example is “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly” by Anthony Bourdain. “Becoming a Chef” by Anderew Dorenburg may also be of interest. Journalist Michael Ruhlman wrote two excellent titles on cooking, “The Making of a Chef” which is about the experiences of a class of students at the Culinary Institute of American, and “The Soul of a Chef” which looks at the Master Chef examination and the lives and work of 2 of America’s more prominent chefs. There are others but these are the ones that spring to mind.
College does a lot more than prepare you for a career (heck, your lucky if it does that). It exposes you to new ideas. It teaches you how to think critically. Most importantly, it gives you the broad intellectual background that is really hard to get on your own. There is no other time in your life where all you will be expected to do is improve yourself. There is no other time where you’ll be encouraged to read, explore, learn and discover. You’ve got the rest of your life to work your ass off. Take this one oppertunity. At the very least, you’ll end up a better conversationalist, a better writer, have a nifty diploma, and never have to say that you didn’t go to college.
College is also a pretty important time socially. Not only will you have the chance to have a heck of a lot of fun, but you’ll be having fun with the future “somebodies” of the world- people who can help you in the future. The social networks you’ll build in college will last a lifetime, and it’s pretty hard to build that sort of thing on your own. Plus, college is full of people that are there soley to help you, encourage you, and bring out the best in your. There are hundreds of programs and services provided to students- career centers, sports teams, study abroad programs, health care, recreational activities, various clubs, internships, arts and lecture events, workshops…all kinds of stuff. And this is the last time you’ll ever be taken care of like that. The real world is full of people that don’t give a damn if you sink or swim. But now, while you are young and have so many paths open to you, you have a chance to give yourself a good head start by taking advantage of as much of this as you can.
Your gonna work your ass off for the rest of your life. And the particular path you want to go one is one of the hardest darn ones. Restraunts are a vicious business. Very few people really “succeed” in it. Most scrape by. Many lose all they ever had. All will work long hours in hot kitches at breakneck speed. It’s not easy, pretty work. Your not gonna run a restraunt right off- it takes work, luck, connections and experience to even have a chance at that. There is no glamour in it whatsoever.
After college, you’ll have a better idea of what you want to do. Most people end up majoring in something that they never even thought they’d be doing. You’ll get a better idea of where you want to go through your general education requirments. Don’t worry about not having it all figured out yet- few do. If you find you really do want to cook when the time to declare your major comes around, get a business degree. This will prepare you for the financial aspects of running a restraunt and put you way ahead of the pack in cooking school.
Chaoticdonkey, just a comment on your premise: does that mean that if you did get the aid money, that you would have been happy to become a doc, etc? Just make sure that you separate the financial issues from the question of following your dream.
Being an alum of Cornell, I can second the recommendation of the Cornell Hotel Management program. It is a very highly regarded program, and the Hotelies I knew loved it. In addition to the science of cooking, people in that program learned a lot about economics, business management, etc. And if they decided that they didn’t want to be chefs or restauranteurs after all, lots went off to business or law school. Hell, I even knew one Hotelie who got into med school!
[QUOTE=RobertP] Chaoticdonkey, just a comment on your premise: does that mean that if you did get the aid money, that you would have been happy to become a doc, etc? Just make sure that you separate the financial issues from the question of following your dream.
[QUOTE]
If I was going to get to go through college for free, I would have been fine with becoming a doctor, etc. However, now that I know I’m paying for it, culinary school was looking better. I had sort of wanted to go before, but the price had scared me off.
