marmalady said:
The pay scale in restaurants is notoriously low, unless you gain one of the top spots at a very high end restaurant.
The down sides to a career in the culinary arts, especially in the kitchen, are that it's backbreaking, stressful work ... long, weird hours, and having to deal with many types of 'dispositions' and personalities in the kitchen ...
Get some experience in a restaurant, even if it's washing dishes.
Emphatically ditto this. Your status as underdog will garner you much hideous abuse from what marmalady diplomatically describes as 'many types of dispositions' in the kitchen. As she advises, get some experience in a restaurant kitchen
before you plunk down any tuition money. Chain restaurants are always hiring. Scrambling eggs for the before-and-after-church crowd in a Cracker Barrel for a couple of months will educate you in many ways.
Don't focus on the pastry part at first, focus on the working-in-a-restaurant part. If you're lucky enough to hook up with a kitchen staffer who doesn't actively hate being there, make known your ambition; maybe you'll get lucky and s/he will throw you a tip or two between the madhouse rushes. If they don't kill you or laugh you out of the house first.
Get strong. You'll have to lift heavy things, like beef sides and BIG stockpots. If someone offers to teach you something and it doesn't have to do with pastry, accept the offer anyway.
Think about all the celebrity chefs you know of. Think how few of them are pastry chefs. Think about why.
If you want it badly enough, you'll do it. You won't let yourself be discouraged by the advice you get here or anywhere else. But the best thing you can do for yourself is know the reality of what it is you want, or think you want. And as luck would have it, the profession of chef offers many opportunities to learn the reality in a way that other professions don't. You can't practice at being a lawyer. You
can practice at being a chef, get an idea of what you're buying into ... and they'll even pay you, even if it's wages that wouldn't keep a dog alive.
But hey, good luck!