Paths

People in my family wonder why my educational ambitions are in the direction of The Culinary Institute Od America instead of the sort of academic work I've pursued in the past. After all, I went straight on through from the undergraduate work I did in writing to the graduate work I did in communication, spending seven total years at Drury University completing it all. That's not even where I stopped, taking social studies classes at University Of Arkansas for a year in preparation for a Master Of Arts In Teaching, although I declined to attend that program after the head of it indicated that, although he would allow me into the program, he really didn't want me there. In fact, that's probably the heart of why I don't want to go back to traditional academia. They never really approved of my participation in that area. Sure, Drury was a warm cocoon with Hogwarts like sense of home and I sincerely enjoyed my time there. However, there was something about the classroom environment at the graduate level that caused me to get on everyone's bad side. While this happened sometimes at the undergraduate level, it was every damned class at the graduate one. Combine this with the head of the education department at University Of Arkansas saying he flat-out didn't want me, and it clinched the idea that academia doesn't want me.

Some of the more observant of you might note that my culinary classmates didn't like me at NWACC either and that I am also worried about that circumstance repeating itself at CIA. How, then, is academia any different? Encouragement from faculty and staff is how culinary is different from academia. Even my worst relationship with a chef instructor at NWACC was better than most of my relationships with faculty and staff in academia. There was no bullshit, you see. That's always been the thing that made me think food service would be a good environment for me in the first place. Beyond having a passion for it, I appreciate that food service people will call a spade a spade. Nobody's gonna coddle you. Anybody, classmate or chef instructor alike, who had a problem with me made it very clear to me where I stood them very early on with as little subtlety as possible. If I did something wrong in my food service jobs, I would be confronted about it immediately and harshly rebuffed. That beats my various regular jobs, including academic ones, where doing something wrong would get you complained about to the boss while you continued to labor in blissful ignorance of the axe about to fall on your head. Here's another thing to remember. I have never been fired from any of my food service jobs and am considered rehireable at all of them, while I can't say the same for any other job.

As you can tell, I've grown cold on academia, and really all white collar work environments, because they have grown cold on me. You can't really expect the passion necessary to make it through any kind of graduate program to remain sufficiently hot with that much chill in the room. My culinary passion, on the other hand, has never wavered. Even after a culinary school experience full of assholes, injuries and scars, a failed company, and no small amount of discouragement, I continue to ride along unbroken however battered I might get. Say I did go off to SIU Carbondale, a school that has actually accepted me into various PhD programs in the past, for a few years and came back home to Springfield to attempt to ply my trade at the various local universities and colleges. Would there be any reason to think I'd get a job teaching? There's no reason in the world to think that. First of all, my likely areas, like English, Communication, and History, are positively bursting with PhDs in the market for those kinds of jobs to the point where there are simply more of them than there are jobs. Hard sciences, sure, in demand, but humanities professors are a dime a dozen. If I went through the truly hard work I know that involves, I'd be serving a very frosty master for reward that is unlikely to materialize. CIA may not end in a job either, but the passion is there and I'll take that over frosty academia any day.

-Frank