The Story

I want to share a clip of my culinary school application essay that I’ve
edited a bit since I finished the program. I hope you like it!

My family is seated around a table complete with cloth napkins, meticulous table settings, fresh flowers, and handwritten menus. You may be fooled into believing it’s a real restaurant setting…until you look down at the menu and see that it’s written in magic marker, and tonight’s meal includes a choice of eggs on toast or a tuna sandwich. The chef enters, and it’s a beaming elementary-aged girl, dressed head-to-toe in a chef’s jacket and hat.

There are home videos to prove it — even as a child I was passionate about food, and re-creating the dining experiences I’d visited or seen on TV. Even if the food wasn’t exactly gourmet, it brought me so much joy to serve my family something that I’d prepared just for them.

But unlike other childhood hobbies, my passion for food didn’t wane as I got older, and I took a part-time job at a local catering and event planning company in high school.

As high school was coming to a close, I romanticized bypassing a traditional four-year college and going straight to culinary school but decided to attend Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles for a degree in business marketing. After graduation, I joined an advertising agency as a digital media planner and, while I enjoyed my job, it didn’t enable me to flex my creative muscles in the kitchen.

That’s when I started my original food blog, Honeycrisp. It was a way for me to bring the joy of food back into my life outside of my office job. A year after running Honeycrisp, I reached out to one of my favorite food influencers in Los Angeles, Barrett Prendergast of Valleybrink Road, and started working various weekend events for her. I fell in love with the idea of making someone’s event special with the perfect combination of food, décor and attention to detail. It truly re-invigorated my yearning to pursue a culinary arts career.

Fast forward a bit – I had been out of college for almost four years and I was back living in San Francisco (a quick drive away from where I grew up).

I had never been more certain that I want food to be the crux of my career — not just a side gig. I no longer wanted to tell people, “My dream is to work in the food industry.” I wanted to take the next step and make it happen for myself. So, after a lot of consideration, I decided to enroll in San Francisco Cooking School’s part time professional culinary program.

What drew me to SF Cooking School is that it provides an all-encompassing culinary education that culminates in a three-month externship at a local restaurant. The school encourages students to explore and discover a variety of careers in the food industry and it provides the resources necessary to help students and alumni succeed. The classes are small (there were 10 in mine!) and collaborative and the hands-on opportunities with local chefs and purveyors are a huge perk.

While the hours were daunting and balancing school, my job and my social life were intense (to say the least!), I’ve never felt so excited, hopeful or creatively fulfilled before in my life. After all of these years of knowing I wanted to attend culinary school, I FINALLY did it and came out the other end as a much stronger, educated and efficient cook!

I hope to inspire you to follow your passion (no matter what that is!) and at the very least, try a new technique or recipe. Food brings people together and creates memories that can last far beyond the meal itself — that’s what I love about it the most.