Turn on the television these days and it seems you can’t flip past three stations before you see something dealing with cooking. Whether it’s Wolfgang Puck hawking his latest steel on HSN or that bitch Cat Cora given an E for effort on Iron Chef, professionals in kitchens seem to be the latest public obsession (if you don’t count John & Kate Plus Eight or Twilight). Culinary school is the first and most obvious choice that comes to mind, but is it the best one? There are many roads you can take to get yourself into a kitchen and paid for your cooking. We’re going to show you a few, and let you do the cutting from there.

If your ideas of being a chef include creating lavish dinner parties for your friends on your nights off, stepping into the dining room to say hello to friends between tickets, or a bright white chef’s coat, then you should probably hang up your apron right now. You would make a horrible anything in a professional kitchen. Not to be harsh, but there has recently been a romance associated with a profession that for a long time was the work of ex-cons in this country. That should be squashed to save everyone a lot of time and energy, not to mention a lot of bad cooking. To really make it in a kitchen these days you need to be able to do three things very well: listen, learn and stay creative. It doesn’t matter where you’ve worked or where you’ve gone to school, if you ever stop doing any of these three things, your days will be numbered.

So how do you get started? Well, for every one hundred people who watch one too many episodes of Top Chef and sign up for Le Cordon Blue, maybe two or three become a cook worth his or her salt in a professional kitchen. The role is best assumed by someone who has spent time in a restaurant, keeping restaurant hours, when you’re on your feet and moving for five to eight hours at a time. Walking in from a job in a candle store will test anyone’s physical endurance. So if you think you may be interested, we would recommend working in some form inside a restaurant before heading to the back of the house.

If you’ve read this far and still want to cook for a living, there are two very good options available. One is cooking school. The average yearly cost of a decent cooling school is close to or above $30,000. Very similar to a good college, with no living expenses paid, and you will still be having to buy groceries. If you do not know anything about the way a restaurant works, and don’t know anyone or anyway to get a job in one, this would be the best way to go. Some schools have better reputations than others, and even more than in college, your school can decide a job for you right after you graduate. Top schools have programs set up with most of the top chefs, especially the big ones like Gordon Ramsay and Roy Yamaguchi. If you do decide to go the route of school, start gunning for the job you want when you first get your knives. You’ll have a much better shot at getting it.

The other way of becoming a chef is the more traditional, yet less popular way these days. It is to go into a restaurant you love and ask the executive chef if there is any room for you to do anything he needs: chopping onions, washing dishes or cleaning the floor. These days it may take a few more knocks on a few more doors to find an opening, but once you do, you do anything there is to do, never asking about pay or hours. Focus on doing each task assigned to you as well as you can, even if it’s peeling potatoes.

Constantly be looking at what the people in the positions above you are doing and most importantly, always keep a pocket notebook and sharpie on you. Even if you’re the dishwasher, keep both with you and write down anything of importance. In the kitchen, stuff starts moving fast when business picks up and it is very easy to forget things. Whenever there is an extra job to be done, be the first with your hand up and pretty soon, you’ll be moving up the ranks. This way of doing it provides less sacrifice in the beginning (you’re being paid to be there, not the other way around), and you’ve accomplished your goal from day one: you’re being paid to cook, or at least to chop onions for the first few months. Whatever, food is now around you 24 hours a day, and you’re in a real kitchen. Is it all you dreamed of?

Well, for many, in truth, it is not. Being a chef is quite like being a lawyer, and the number of people who end up truly enjoying what they do is probably similar in both fields. If you are an executive chef, you will probably be working close to seventy hours a week, and away from home until 11p.m. or midnight most nights. If you are lucky enough to own your own restaurant, add another twenty hours to that work week and you can’t leave until the doors are locked each night. The cold hard fact is that cooking in the restaurant business just does not run that strongly through many people’s veins. Again, we are not trying to discourage you from following your dreams, for if the dream is bright enough, what was just mentioned above sounds like fun! So choose your path, young culinary whiz-kid, and show the world a thing or two.