I was the annoying girl who carried a camera in her pocket every single day of culinary school. But even as my classmates made fun of me, they were going to my Flickr account every night after class to see if they’d turned up in my photos. On graduation day, a woman I’d never even met presented her son with a hardcover book of his best culinary school moments: more than 100 photos printed directly from my web album. Some weren’t even from culinary school, but were personal snapshots from my trip to Barcelona!

Did she introduce herself? (She would certainly have recognized me, having gone through my entire online photo collection.) No. Did she thank me? Of course not.

I know it seems petty, given that the photos weren’t used commercially, but I was hurt by her casual pilfering of a project I had put a lot of love into. I amassed literally thousands of photos, and it wasn’t easy. Many of them were taken during service, when I was working the line. When I saw all my classmates at the graduation ceremony oohing and ahhing over the pictures and forgetting their origin, I felt sick. It’s taken me nearly a year to start looking through the shots again and realize that I’ve kept an incredible record of a very exciting time in my life–one that might be interesting for other people to look at, too.

I’m presenting a few of the photos with a small, personal guide for anyone considering culinary school. Nine months on, I have a pretty good sense of what I learned and didn’t learn, and the doors my diploma has and hasn’t opened for me. I hope you’ll find this useful, and that my alma mater doesn’t sue me.

Chocolate-hazelnut souffle cake, the most popular dessert in the school restaurant. Of course.

Do you want to be a chef? Really, truly want to be a chef?

Then save your money and go work in a restaurant kitchen. Work hard, and work your way up. Even if you work for free, which you might have to do if you want to train with the best, you are spending less than you would on culinary school. Thomas Keller learned to cook at country clubs. Heston Blumenthal opened his restaurant first, and then taught himself to cook. I’m not saying that there are no prominent chefs who went to culinary school: David Chang, Wylie Dufresne and Bobby Flay all went to the same one I did, in fact. But a diploma is not a prerequisite.

People emerge from culinary school with debt equivalent to that of recent law graduates. But the novice cook makes in a day what a lawyer spends on lunch, and a cook at the top of his game makes a junior lawyer’s starting salary. This is no news, and the New York Times covered it last year. But maybe it bears repeating, because people are still flocking to culinary school imagining their faces on a line of dishware.

I adored this duck dish, which we served with apple and celeriac puree. The recipe sparked an obsession with pomegranate molasses.

Culinary school does make sense for some people. People like me, who see themselves at a writing desk instead of a chopping board. People who love food and want to become knowledgeable about it, but don’t necessarily love food service. It’s really very different.

Working in a restaurant kitchen mostly sucks, so you really have to love what you do. The hours are crazy, accidents are frequent, and the social environment can be oppressive. I wasn’t motivated to learn in a real restaurant kitchen, so I picked a more nurturing environment. I made friends–some for life–and had a really wonderful rapport with my chef-instructors. The year I attended culinary school was the year New York City pushed me to the brink of collapse, and if I hadn’t been able to go to class and learn fabulous things from kind, warm people, I might have lost it completely.

I liked this dessert a lot. Basic French preparation of lightly-sweetened fromage blanc, very tart, garnished with berry coulis. This is what I want to eat at the end of meals, but it wasn’t a popular choice in the restaurant. People are so boring with their molten chocolate cakes!

My culinary training has given me good knife skills, a solid grasp of the core techniques and a heightened awareness of food. It means I can play armchair recipe detective while surfing food blogs: I can’t count the times I’ve encountered bloggers who bitch and moan about a recipe “not working”, and then post photos showing clearly where they themselves have botched things. Professionally, it has equipped me to cater parties, style food and edit recipes.

The cheese class was probably the best day of the entire curriculum, even though they wouldn’t let us touch the plates until we’d finished watching an hour-long documentary.

What it hasn’t done is make the food world come running. I was prepared for the restaurant world to be unimpressed by a diploma, but I didn’t foresee that food magazines and TV production companies would be similarly underwhelmed. (Of course, I live in New York, where everyone is underwhelmed at all times. Your diploma will go much further in a smaller city.) I received so many rejections over the last year–rejections I never would have anticipated–that I began to feel like I was auditioning for a Broadway role instead of an editorial assistant’s. In the white-collar world as in the blue, a culinary diploma is all very well, but they want to know which restaurants you’ve worked at.

The truth is that there is only so much culinary school can teach you. You don’t graduate with the miraculous ability to reproduce Grant Achatz’s dishes after a single bite. If you want to cook like Grant Achatz you’ll have to go work for him, for many years. Your education can certainly set you up to succeed, but it’s not a substitute for on-the-job training.

The reason there’s a chunk taken out of the pineapple cake is…I ate it.

Given the choice, I would do it all again. Culinary school has brought me much closer to achieving my goal, which is to make a living writing artfully and, in time, with authority, about food. Being more interested in the cultural aspects of food than I am in Michelin-starred food service, I determined that culinary school was right for me. I urge you to consider your goals and your personality before committing to a diploma program.

Confit bayaldi before being placed in the oven. This is the same dish that finally wows the food critic in the animated film Ratatouille.

Some parting advice:

Prepare to gain a lot of weight. (I gained a staggering 15 pounds over the course of the year, which I lost within two months of graduating simply by no longer being a culinary student.) Disabuse yourself of the notion that home cooking translates into the restaurant kitchen: I’ve seen a lot of Martha Stewart types crumble during service. Expect a lot of friends to come out of the woodwork and demand to be invited to dinner parties.

This is just one woman’s perspective, but I hope you found it helpful.

Vat of veal stock you could boil a man in.

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