Helping Your Kids Follow Their Passions (even if they don’t know what they are yet!)

Summing up Mazzy's experience with WorldStrides - thank you to WorldStrides for sponsoring this post!

When I was a kid, I had a very limited outlook on future career prospects. In my head, when someone asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” the job options available were:

1. Doctor

2. Lawyer

3. Teacher

4. Actress

5. Astronaut

The first three seemed boring, the last way too scary and I loved television and theater, so actress it was. I never stopped to think about all the people who weren’t onscreen or onstage that helped make entertainment happen– the directors, the writers, the producers, etc. I think if I had, I may have taken a different career path. But instead, when I realized I had an insurmountable case of stage fright, I gave up on my chosen dream job entirely.

What else did I have experience with? Advertising. In 6th grade, my teacher assigned us weekly Friday projects centered around creating commercials. I loved working on those commercials all week, using all my creative energy to sell a product, and actually looked forward to presenting them to the class. And so, thanks to Mrs. Cohen, the job of “advertising” entered my brain’s consideration set. Also, if you think about the TV shows and movies at the time, you saw shows about doctors, lawyers and for some reason, advertisers. Bosom Buddies, they were in advertising, Thirty Something, they opened their own ad agency, Who’s the Boss, Angela was the boss of an advertising company. Truly, I believe that you can’t be what you cannot see, and what I saw was acting and advertising.

Long story short, I went to college to be an actress, hated it, and then switched to graphic design, interned at an ad agency, built a portfolio, got a job as an assistant and worked my way up to creative director. Then I got derailed and ended up doing what I am doing now, which, weirdly enough, combines the two: being on camera and ads! Funny how life works sometimes.

But every now and then, I think about what could have been an alternative path. I think I could have been great in a writer’s room of a sitcom or I could have had real potential as a director, I just didn’t realize they were things I could pursue when I was choosing my career. And even if I had picked them, I don’t know that I would have been able to identify a path to success or even how to get started.

Because of this, I have always tried to expose my girls to all the different career possibilities that I didn’t think about. Mazzy and Harlow are also creative, so I might say something like— you like TV and writing dialogue, you could write a TV show! You like dancing, you could be a choreographer! You like art, you could pick the colors for make-up palettes! I got that idea because I once met a woman who does that for a makeup company and she started by being a fine art major.

Still, if you ask Mazzy, she does not yet have a dream job or something she knows she wants to pursue. Which might be a good thing, because I’m also fully aware that most of the jobs our kids will have in the future don’t even exist yet. But I love opening their minds up to the possibilities, which is why I was so excited when WorldStrides reached out to us earlier this year with the idea to send Mazzy on one of their programs.

You may be familiar with WorldStrides as a company that organizes 8th grade class trips to DC, but they also offer a whole host of educational travel experiences; some in partnership with your child’s school, and some that you can sign up for individually. Many programs are designed to explore a specific interest, like robotics, music, religion, history, and leadership, with tons of career driven opportunities and itineraries. Since Mazzy didn’t have a specific interest in mind, WorldStrides decided to send us on the trip that worked best with our schedules— a Cook Around the World program that takes place at Epcot in Disney World, where Mazzy would get to work with a team of aspiring young chefs in a cooking competition. We both thought that sounded fantastic and headed off to Orlando!

Normally, a parent would not accompany their child on the trip, but I was there to document Mazzy’s experience. It was also a wonderful way to get some much needed mother-daughter time– our schedule has been non-stop since the school year started last September, so the opportunity to just be together for a couple of days in a fun location for an enriching experience felt like stolen time.

On the day of the competition, we headed to Epcot, and met the WorldStrides team who couldn’t have been nicer. They made sure we all had our chef coats, badges, and everything else we needed to start the day. Then they led us into the tent, which was filled with hundreds of aspiring young chefs from all over the country. WorldStrides’ mission is to give students the opportunity for experiential learning, and I can’t think of anything better than a giant cooking competition! There were even celebrity chefs in attendance who would be doing the judging.

We could feel the excitement in the room and tell there were some pretty serious student chefs in the house, which made me nervous, because as we all know, the chefs of my family (Mike and Harlow) were holding down the fort in New York. Although, Mazzy looked pretty official once she put on her chef coat and seemed confident. We met our teammates, got acquainted with our cooking station and then the instructions for the challenge were announced. Every team was going to receive a mystery basket of main ingredients you were required to use (one protein, one starch and one vegetable) as well as a region to theme your cuisine. Then there were time intervals to menu plan, gather additional ingredients, prep, cook and plate.

Our location was Africa, and the mystery basket contained couscous, chicken, and okra. As soon as the basket was open, it was pretty clear who the cooking aficionados were on our team and Mazzy happily followed instructions of what to gather (she was in charge of getting all the additional ingredients from the pantry station) and what to do once she got back. She was tasked with chopping and breading the okra. Before we got there, I was a little worried about how Mazzy would fare in this kind of setting (she is not an aspiring chef), but the competition was all about teamwork which was perfect for her. Mazzy, as all her teachers have always told us, is an excellent team player. She’s excited to participate, loves hands-on projects, and not afraid to get her hands dirty. All those things made her a wonderful sous chef to the leaders of the group. 

Harlow may be the baker of the family, but I really loved watching Mazzy come to life through this process. She was able to take direction, contributed ideas during the brainstorming phase, and quickly became a valued member of the team. It was a particular joy to watch her light up when one of the leaders held up a box of colored pencils and said they needed someone to design the menu for the judges. Mazzy volunteered and made a beautifully detailed menu, even crowdsourcing to come up with creative names for the dishes.

When the judges came around to check on our progress, one judge called it “the best menu design I’ve seen at one of these things!” (Later I realized, most teams had just scrawled the names of their dishes in chicken scratch.) I could see that Mazzy felt real pride in her contribution. After all, a well rounded team is always better than a team of 12 with the exact same talent.

After we plated our dishes and sent them off to the judges (“knives down!”), we got to walk around and sample all the other teams’ offerings. Let me tell you, these kids can cook! Everything we tried was delicious.

At the awards gala later that night, several teams were awarded for their work (our team was not one of them) but we cheered on everyone that won, ate delicious food, and listened to a keynote speech by Anne Burrell, who talked about struggling in school and then discovering her passion for cooking which eventually opened many doors for her that she didn’t imagine. Another speaker talked about how his love of cooking led to his decision to go to a school for hospitality, which I think helped many students in that room evision a path for themselves. There were also tables around the room with college representatives and networking opportunities within the food industry.

One of the things Mazzy and I talked about was how the kids around us were getting to explore their passion in an incredibly cool environment, beyond what school alone can provide and how an experience like this helps you plan and make connections for your future. After the event, we pulled up the WorldStrides website to see what other programs they offered that might spark something in Mazzy. There are STEM programs, international experiences, and the thing she found most interesting— a program with the Disney Imagineering program. Someone gets paid to design those theme parks! And it’s not just the engineers; it’s artists and storytellers.

One of the tenants of WorldStrides’ mission is giving students “life changing moments” and even though cooking may not be Mazzy’s future career, I think the event helped her see more clearly where a passion can lead you and how a program like WorldStrides can help you come up with tactical strategies and tools to set you on the right path to success. For me, our WorldStrides experience helped me realize that I can be more proactive about finding these opportunities for my kids. Sure, you can wait until your school offers them to the students, but you can also make your school aware of a program that would be a good fit. Or your kid can get involved with a club that might ladder up to a program that the parents can organize together.

And who knows? Maybe in a few years Mazzy will have narrowed down her options and be on another WorldStrides program, experiencing a totally different life changing moment. Or maybe she’ll be designing restaurant menus for a living and point back to her experience at Cook Around the World as the defining moment when she realized she knew what she wanted to do.

Click THIS LINK to learn more about all the educational travel programs that WorldStrides offers, and click HERE if you want to learn more about Cook Around the World!