“Before I came to BSA I was teaching social studies at Patterson high school and then before that at Chinquapin middle school. Before that I was a professionally trained chef or classically trained chef I should say. Cooking was something I first started doing at home. I was really young, but I remember distinctly, probably like late elementary school, starting to really get into cooking and I don't mean like fancy cooking. I was just happy to be cooking whether I was cooking eggs for breakfast, or whether I was making sandwiches, I always found joy in food - preparing it and eating it too but more honestly, the preparing part. The jobs that I always wanted in high school were jobs like at restaurants and things like that. So that was sort of a natural fit for me. I liked the work. You were standing up. You were working. You were interacting with people. It wasn't a boring desk job. I always felt sort of alive doing it. The time went by really quickly. I went to culinary school. I knew I wasn't ready to go to college. My parents were like, well, you have to do something. So I decided I was going to go to culinary school and I did a program in Vermont, The New England Culinary Institute. That was how I started doing hotel work because I worked for an exclusive club down in Florida and then I went to go work for Four Seasons out in Santa Barbara in Southern California. And I was like, I like this work. So that's what I did and then I ended up getting this gig down in St. Petersburg Beach that was sort of my epiphany about life. I was working at a hotel in St. Petersburg Beach Florida called the Don Cesar which is this really fancy, pink hotel right on the Gulf of Mexico and they offered me an executive manager position at the hotel being the executive steward. I had to decide for myself. Because it paid well and it had good benefits, I knew that if I took that position I was forever going to be working for hotels. I wasn't sure if I wanted to do that. I thought about it for awhile. I said no to the job. I ended up applying to Penn State as an undergrad because I was like I want to go back to school, I want to get a degree. I left Florida. I left that job. I told them I didn't want to work for the hotel anymore and I became an undergrad student at 23. The way that I was able to support myself was by teaching cooking to nutrition and hotel restaurant institution majors. I liked teaching them cooking and I liked history so I became a history major to then become a history teacher and putting all those pieces together, then I came here to Baltimore to teach history.”