Fresh Start: Rediscovering Your Passions and Purpose

Do you love to create and share yourself through your cooking? With so much upheaval in the job market, many people are reassessing their lives and deciding what is truly important to them.

Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost in the last year, and many more will follow as the recession continues. For many of these people, the job loss has been devastating.

For others, though, it has been an opportunity to reevaluate their lives and to make new choices regarding their chosen occupations.

If you have found yourself questioning your career choice due to the economy, this might be the time to think about what you want to do. Think of all those people working so hard in the financial district only to have it all come crashing down in the recession.

You can bet that many of them are now questioning whether or not they made the most fulfilling career choices for themselves.

While we certainly don’t want to make light of the challenging position that so many find themselves in, it seems like a good idea to learn from the example they have unwittingly set. Working for years in a job that is not personally satisfying, only to have it taken away, really makes one evaluate what is essential before moving forward.

Do What You Enjoy Doing Most

So, what has stopped you if you’ve always dreamed of being a professional chef or baker? There’s a good chance that it was job security. So often, we find a job and end up sticking with it out of a sense of security rather than changing to do what we want. If this recession has taught us anything, even those fall-back jobs are not secure.

To move into a job that is a better fit for your interests and abilities, it may be time to consider getting a degree in the culinary arts. There are hundreds of culinary schools across the U.S, and they can give you just the boost you need to make the leap into a new, fulfilling career.

Many of these schools even offer flexible schedules. This means you can go to school to study what you’re passionate about while still maintaining your current “secure” job.

While the need to work and go to school simultaneously can be a bit overwhelming, it can help calm fears about making a big job transition upon graduation from culinary arts school.

In addition to clinging to what we perceive to be a secure job, other obstacles keep people from pursuing their dreams, such as attending culinary school. One of the biggest is money.

Education isn’t cheap, and the best chefs attend school to learn their craft correctly. Finding the extra money needed to follow in their footsteps can seem almost impossible.

Finding Help Getting Into Culinary Institute, Baking School or Hospitality Management College

Fortunately, the goal of every school is to have students to teach. This means that they will work with you in every way they can to help you find ways to pay for your education.

Many people don’t even consider that they can pay their tuition in installments, but the school you choose may be able to set you up on a payment plan rather than expect the full tuition amount in advance.

Each of these institutions will also have a financial aid department that can help you find ways to finance your culinary education. Most will be able to help you pursue federal funding through grants and loans. In addition, they may have special scholarships for which you apply.

A little creative research may also turn up other resources. For example, it is possible that your current employer offers help with tuition or that a club or organization to which you belong has a scholarship program for people like you.

The point is to utilize the economic crisis in a personal way. It’s been proven that there are few guarantees when it comes to employment, so it’s up to each of us to make our own way.

For those interested in the culinary arts, this may be just the motivation they need to take a step away from what they always thought of as “secure” and toward what they will find fulfilling.