— Sangeeta Chatterjee

You know, the best way to be able to start a career change like that, um, is really to start doing it while you're doing whatever you're doing now, specifically being a food critic or food blogger. Uh, start doing it while you're doing whatever job you're also doing at the same time. Um, put up a website, start writing in lots. Um, I have a journalism background. I went to the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, was a professional writer for years and years. And the key to being a writer, I really writing all the time, um, and publishing all the time. So you can, uh, start out by doing like reviews of cookbooks. You can do different recipes and explore with those. You can take family recipes, print them out, and be able to utilize those as well. Um, you can start doing food critics on your own, just, uh, representing yourself as well too. You don't have to tell anybody you're going in to be the food critic, you would still just pay just like you normally would and everything, but you can put out reviews in that same way. Um, now I wouldn't do things like the, uh, like, like Yelp or anything like that. You can put your reviews on there if you'd like to, but I would probably stick to more having them on, uh, a website of your own to be able to start publishing. Um, and then use that as a portfolio. So after you're doing it for a bit, pick out your best 10 articles, um, and use those to show, uh, your best work to a publisher. So if you're going to a local magazine or a local newspaper, you can show some of the things that you've written in the past and that just kind of basically, uh, uses steps like that to be able to kind of increase where you're going and what you wanna do as a critic or food blogger. So best advice for you is start writing and writing a lot.