A Community of Cooks

I belong to a community of cooks. When I close my eyes, I am instantly transported to a familiar world of spice, language, and most prominently: food. 

Beginning in my junior year, nearly every hour that I wasn’t in high school I spent in a stainless steel kitchen, choreographing orders like a dance, and collaborating with people from all over the world. 

My nightly trip on Chicago’s Blue Line functioned as my wardrobe, transporting me from my predominantly white, upper-middle-class high school, to a Narnia-esque multicultural tapestry on the north side of the city. 

I depended on and formed friendships with coworkers from Eritrea, Mexico, and Thailand, all of us connected through our jobs and passion for cooking. At the end of particularly difficult shifts, we would cook for each other. I was blessed with tsebhi sga (a traditional Eritrean stew) and tom kha kai (chicken coconut soup). In return, I cooked pesto gnocchi, a dish my mom made growing up. 

In this micro-community, cooking became the platform in which we exchanged our cultures, experiences, and ideas. I will carry the spirit of the kitchen into the broader academic and social communities I engage with, working collaboratively towards our common goals. This is my statement of purpose.

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Forged In Fire: Overcoming Obstacles in the Kitchen

It is a unique feeling to watch a plate carried out of your kitchen with an order you are certain is incorrect. As the realization hits, you frantically tear after the waiter, hoping to catch him in time. In those few instances he slips through, you are overcome with a distinctive combination of guilt, searing embarrassment, and a slight pinch of fear. This was a feeling that I became intimately familiar with in my two years of employment for the Fifty/50 company.

I assumed the role of Cook Staff Coordinator in my junior year of high school. My job was to communicate orders from the waiters to line cook staff. If a server brought me an order of sixteen pizzas, it was my responsibility to ensure that the order went out safely and on time. On the weekends, these servers combined brought in about four hundred orders a night.

Leading in a restaurant was a trial by fire and initially, fire was definitely not my element. In the beginning, it was a common occurrence to have customers send food back and one time a customer marched into the back kitchen cursing me out for an overcooked salmon.

My time in the kitchen was not without its downsides, but it taught me two hard-earned lessons about leadership. Firstly, a leader focuses on building lasting relationships with everyone around them because the best way to solve a problem is together. Without a team of talented and collaborative people, I could not have produced one order a night, let alone four hundred. Secondly, vulnerability is not weakness. Taking accountability for mistakes demonstrates growth to yourself and others. I will remember these two leadership lessons and the people that I learned from far longer than any of my feelings of guilt or embarrassment.

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