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"\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nJordan Zimmerman has one of the best jobs imaginable: She gets paid to eat cheese. The 23-year-old former Texas debutante is the education and events manager at Murray's, New York City's premier cheese shop, where she samples the product, hosts events, and teaches classes about all things stinky. A recent Yale graduate, Jordan quickly worked her way up the cheesemonger ranks. She spoke with Cosmopolitan.com about her ridiculously fun job and how to break into an industry where your job is to eat and drink delicious things.\n\nI wanted to be a politician or work in government , maybe as an ambassador or something like that. So I started off double majoring in political science and international studies. I was coming from Mesquite, Texas, somewhere so small that I think I just looked for the thing that felt the broadest and went for that \u2014 I went for the complete opposite of what I grew up with, which was a place where everyone stays at home and gets married and moves in next door to their parents.I chose Yale after I was accepted and visited the campus. My mom and I flew up for two whirlwind days. I made my decision in the first 20 seconds.There was actually a point at which everything changed. I was a sophomore in college, and Yale's summers are internship factories \u2014 it's not really acceptable to go home and have a paid job. But I didn't know how to get a government job. Yale has an internship program where alumni sponsor students for internships \u2014 kind of an internship on training wheels. The city that was most interesting to me was New Orleans, so I was just like, \"I'm going to apply for every single internship in New Orleans.\" I applied for all 17 of them. The first place to offer me a position was the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, a nonprofit museum in New Orleans dedicated to the culinary history of the American South, and I had 48 hours to say yes or no. I didn't know if I was going to get another offer so I just took it. I thought, \"Great, I'll be in New Orleans for free for a summer. Sounds good.\"\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nThen when I actually started the internship, my first assignment was to research for an exhibit they were building. My boss brought in cardboard boxes filled with oyster plates, decorated Victorian-era dishes on which hostesses served oysters, and I had to look at all the markings and stamps and find out where they were from, who made them, and what the history was. I threw myself at it. I thought it was so cool. So I stepped back and said, \"If your job is to research oyster plates and you're having a really great time, there's probably something there.\"It was the first time I had ever really had something that I wanted to academically research. I was at Yale, and I felt very much like I had imposter syndrome. I felt like I didn't belong there, that everyone else had something they loved to study and I didn't. I had not been interested in food prior to NOLA. I grew up eating well-done burgers on white buns with slices of Kraft American singles \u2014 and I still do sometimes.\n\nMy boss, Liz, became my mentor that summer. Throughout my career I've had a lot of female mentors, and she was the first one. She would give me books to read, including Southern Food by John Egerton, an amazing overview of historical, cultural, and geographical influences on the rise of a definable Southern food culture, and she would give me websites to go to, and she actually took me on a trip with her and her husband to go to a food festival in South Carolina. She took me under her wing and helped me develop in the field. She gave me a lot of responsibility.I went back to Yale with a new focus. The only way to get into food at Yale was through extracurriculars, because there's not a food-studies program. So I applied and got accepted to work at the Yale farm, a sustainable food project where I was the events intern. I coordinated the farm's Pizza Fridays, where we end our workweek with pizza made with ingredients from the farm, for which I harvested produce, built the fire in our outdoor brick oven, made/kneaded pizza dough, and produced the food for the farm workers and students. I started writing for our food and wine magazine. I joined a cheese club. There were a few classes that you could take on food, so I found them and I took them on the side and eventually switched to American studies as a major. I worked with professors to develop individual studies where I got to make my own syllabus all about food. I created two important syllabi: one was the comparative study of American cheese, with I made with the help of a professor, Maria Trumpler, who was a former cheesemaker in Vermont. I also created a syllabus that explored \"What Is American Food\" with a history professor, Paul Freedman.The next summer, I wanted to be in a different city, but I wanted to be in food in some way. My friend Chloe is from New York and had worked the summer before at Murray's Cheese. So she gave me the contact name of a woman named Liz \u2014 my career is a story of Liz \u2014 Liz Thorpe, who was a big name in cheese. She was the vice president of Murray's at the time, and she was a Yalie, so I cold-called her and asked her if I could work for her. She said, \"Sure, why not, come on in.\" Murray's wasn't technically unpaid \u2014 there was a small monthly stipend \u2014 and although it wasn't nearly enough to live off of, it was still more money than I was making at my other summer job writing for Serious Eats, and I had saved up from my three concurrent jobs at Yale to make it through a New York summer (although that was certainly not easy or cheap). I didn't hesitate to take the internship though.\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nHow I started at Murray's was really important to me and to this industry, which is starting from the bottom. I worked on the cheese counter, cutting cheese for people. I worked in the cheese caves, so I actually did the affinage cheese cave program, where you learn how to actually make cheese in our underground bunker, which is dirty and gross and cold \u2014 very cold, because all the caves are from 34 to 52 degrees. That was miserable. And I got to take classes for free, so I started sitting in the back and helping to pour wine and take out the trash.Halfway through the summer, serendipitously, the girl who was hired to run all the classes gave her two weeks' notice and then left the next day. They needed someone to run the classes, so they looked at me and said, \"You have personality, and you can talk to people. Do you want to get paid?\" And I said, \"Yes, I want to get paid.\" I was renting a room in the East Village where I could touch all four walls at once. I didn't have any money for blankets or an air conditioner, so I just slept on top of a sheet on my bed. I was working six days a week, so I didn't really need money to go do anything else, because I didn't have a lot of time to go out and have a lot of fun. I did four days at Murray's and two days at Serious Eats. The seventh day I just went to sleep.\n\nSo I took the position. As the education associate, I set up for and cleaned up after classes, acted as a customer service rep, signed people up for classes, and even began teaching the basic classes \u2014 mainly lots of Cheese 101 courses. The fact that I had worked on the counter and in the caves made it a lot easier than it may have been otherwise \u2014 I knew my way around the products, and my colleagues respected me and knew that I was knowledgeable and were therefore very willing to help when I asked questions.I've been there for almost two years now. I started at Murray's five days after graduating from Yale. I received a call from my former boss, the education director, in April of 2012 \u2014 I would graduate in late May. I started as the associate manager of education. I was promoted about eight months later to the manager of education. My job has two components: classes and events. We have tasting classes eight times a week, ranging from wine and cheese to beer and cheese to Cheese 101. The other part of my job is event planning \u2014 corporate and private events. I've done a Cheese 101 for a 12-year-old's birthday party and for a mix and mingle event for BNP Paribas. Kids' birthdays have actually been some of the most surprising events for me \u2014 I am often shocked at how much the kids know about milk, bacteria, different styles of cheese, etc. These kids have been exposed to good food, made in healthy ways, so much earlier than I was. It's actually really inspiring, and their enthusiasm is revitalizing on a bad day, and for lack of a less cheesy way to say this, they remind me of the passion for what I do. So not only do I get to work with instructors but I get to lead great events, and sometimes I end up at some really cool places doing events \u2014 the penthouse of the London NYC hotel, Google headquarters.We live in a hyper-competitive world, and coming out of an Ivy League institution, your friends in New York are mostly in finance and consulting. It can sometimes be hard to realize that level of money is not going to be there for you. The food industry is just different. It's a lot about working on the ground. You get paid in wine and cheese, and sometimes you have to remind yourself and step back and say, \"Part of my job is to actually taste the wine and cheese in front of me every day. That doesn't suck. That's payment in itself.\" But it can be a struggle when your friends who live here have higher-paying jobs and you don't get to go out and have that dinner with them or go shopping with them. In the events industry, you're working at night all the time. You work when other people are off work because that's when they can attend your events and your classes. That's a sacrifice. You're having a lot of fun while you're doing it, but that's definitely a frustration. You're not on the same schedule as everyone else in your life.\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nDespite the frustrations, I'm a lifer in this industry. I love food, and I love beverages. Events, especially the performative aspect of it all, is something I feed off of, and I see myself growing in events. Whether those events be food-, beverage-, or food-and-beverage-related is up to chance and the development of my own knowledge as well as connections in the industry \u2014 it's a small one, and the opportunities are endless.\n\nBut even though the food industry is small, there are a ton of different jobs in it. The first thing I tell people is work with the product. You have to be willing to get dirty. You don't get to step into the classroom and just swirl wine around right when you start. You don't have credentials. People don't want you to talk to them about cheese if you've never handled it before.Asking my favorite cheese is like asking who your favorite child is: You say you don't have one, but you totally do. Mine is Colston Bassett Stilton. It's this amazing hand-ladled blue cheese from England, and it is so perfect. It's really spicy and kind of crackery \u2014 it kind of tastes like toast. I had a cheese celebrity moment with the maker, when I served him his cheese on Murray's counter. I had no idea who he was \u2014 he's a very scary, large Scotsman.The most important part of the food world is to work in the service industry, as a server or as a bartender or as a waiter or as someone behind the counter. You understand the product, but you also gain the respect of people around you. In the food business everything is so interconnected. For me, if the people at the cheese counter don't respect me because they think I've never done what they're doing, they can make my life really hard. You want it to be a symbiotic relationship, and you can't do your job without the other people on the counter or on the floor. You have to be willing to take a service job, and don't be afraid to do that \u2014 you can be college-educated and be a server. You'll learn a lot.I'd also say don't be afraid to reach out to someone who can help you and who can give you a boost up. I connect well with female mentors, so I've relied on that. Sometimes people see it as a handout or they don't like to network because they think it's dishonest, and I think that's a really silly way to look at it. People want to help people. So reach out to that person who has the job you want and talk to them and ask them what they can do to help you. It's OK to ask.To be honest, growing up I always wanted to be on stage. If I could do anything, it would be to be a stage actress, like in silly musicals. I would totally be a Broadway actress, hands down. So it was actually kind of cool when I fell into food, and I ended up with this job where I got to be on a stage talking to people. It's totally a performance every day, which couldn't be more fitting.Get That Life is a weekly series that reveals how successful, talented, creative women got to where they are now. Check back each Monday for the latest interview.\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nRELATED: 11 Cheese and Cracker Recipes That Will Change Your Life15 Gooey, Wonderful Grilled Cheese Recipes10 Indulgent Mac and Cheese RecipesFollow Jill on Twitter.Photo credit: Kathleen Kamphausen for Cosmopolitan.com"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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