I started cooking in the summer of 2024.

 

At first, food was deeply tied to my emotions. I slowly realized that my mood, body, and eating habits were caught in a difficult cycle. When I felt low, I turned to food. After eating, I often felt worse. Over time, I began to pay closer attention to what I was eating and how it made me feel. Cooking became a quiet way for me to rebuild a healthier relationship with my body and daily life. What began as simple dishes gradually became a serious personal practice. I started learning recipes, testing combinations, and thinking more carefully about taste, texture, and balance.

 

Among everything I made, cheesecake became the dessert I returned to again and again. It was where repetition turned into understanding, and where copying slowly became creating.

 

After moving to Los Angeles, I spent even more time in the kitchen. I treated it like a small studio for trial, adjustment, and reflection. I kept asking myself how to make a cheesecake that felt balanced and memorable. Not just sweet, but layered. Through constant testing, I developed my own version that carried both comfort and intention.

 

This personal interest later became part of my academic and campus life. In my Influencer Strategies class at USC, I turned homemade cheesecake into a project about connection and influence. I brought 30 cheesecakes to class and used food to start conversations with people I did not know well. That experience taught me that meaningful influence often begins in ordinary, personal exchanges rather than performance alone.I later expanded this idea across campus by exchanging free cheesecake for personal food stories from strangers. Through 37 conversations, I saw how food could open people up in a gentle but powerful way. It created trust, memory, and a sense of closeness that felt more sincere than many online interactions. That project made me realize I am deeply interested in food, community, and experience design.

 

What matters to me now is not only making something delicious. Cooking has taught me patience, structure, observation, and self awareness. It has also changed the way I understand people. Food is never only about taste. It carries memory, emotion, care, and expression. For me, learning how to cook was also learning how to feel more clearly, live more attentively, and connect with others in a more real way.

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Cooking started as something personal, but it has gradually shown me a direction I want to keep building on. In the future, I hope to work in food event organization and create experiences where food becomes a way to connect people, stories, and communities.

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