JENNIFER STERBENZ’S JOURNEY TO THE SWEETER SIDE OF LIFE
OCCUPATION: Baker at Three Babes Bakeshop
CURRENT LOCATION: Oakland, California
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN DEGREE: B.S. in Ceullular & Molecular Biology
GRADUATION YEAR: 2016
ACTIVITIES AT MICHIGAN: I was in a club called United 2 Heal that sends medical supplies overseas. I also did research on circadian rhythms with drosophila for three years and was a study group facilitator for animal physiology for two.
MICHIGAN POPS ORCHESTRA INSTRUMENT: Violin
Listen to Jen’s favorite Pops piece while you read about her Pops Life!
KELLY COMPTON, our Pops Life correspondent, connects with Jen Sterbenz to discover how she found the courage to make a difficult life decision and ended up happier than ever…
KC: Jen, what was your musical background before you got to Michigan, and what led you to Pops?
JS: I always played music growing up as a kid. My mom was a pianist and went to music school during her teen years. She got me into music really early. I started on piano but switched to violin when I was in elementary school, then I played that all throughout high school. When I got to college, I thought Pops would be a cool way to still play my instrument and have a lot more fun!
KC: Do you still play violin or piano nowadays?
JS: Not really… mostly because when I was moving to California I road tripped for a month or month and a half to get here, and I didn’t want to keep my violin with me during that time. It has been passed down through my family so I didn’t want to keep something so valuable and so weather-dependent in my car. I haven’t had a chance to get it out here since then. But the next time I fly home, I may fly it back out here with me.
KC: Tell me about your experience in the Pops Orchestra!
JS: I didn’t start in Pops until my sophomore year because I overslept my audition freshman year! I was in the orchestra for almost the rest of undergrad, except for the final concert senior year. One of my housemates was on the Pops E-Board, so we had a few Pops “get togethers” at my house, and I was always around for those – they were so much fun! As for concerts… I liked playing Game of Thrones A LOT. That was so powerful with the full orchestra.
KC: What have you been up to since you graduated and what led you to California?
Click above to read Jen’s article about optimizing processes in surgical research!
JS: When I graduated, my plan was to go to medical school. I really wanted to be a reconstructive plastic surgeon; they do incredible things like putting body parts back on and helping quadriplegics learn how to walk again. I got a full-time research position working for the Chief of Hand Surgery at U of M Hospital, Dr. Kevin Chung. Hand surgery is a higher level specialization within reconstructive surgery. I did that starting the last semester of my senior year and for two years after that, and… I don’t know. It was very, very stressful. We had a lot a lot of residents and research fellows working on the projects as well, and every single one was like, “Don’t go into this field if you have ANY other marketable skills.”
I started baking my junior year of college when I moved out of the dorms, and somewhere along the line I started joking, “If all else fails, I’ll just start a bakery.” As time went on, I realized the baking thing didn’t sound so bad… after a particularly stressful Christmas in 2017 I decided that I was either going to go to my #1 choice of med school, or I was going to move and start baking. A few months later I decided to go the baking route, and I started my road trip out to California. I applied to baking jobs on the road. I had an interview my first week here at an AMAZING bakery, I’ve been baking full-time ever since!
KC: What is the name of the bakery where you work at?
JS: The Three Babes Bakeshop. We actually don’t have a storefront; we do mostly wholesale products. We do Google’s breakfast every morning, sometimes Lyft’s as well, and we also sell at a bunch of farmer’s markets and do online orders.
KC: When did your passion for baking begin?
JS: Summer after my sophomore year was the first time I ever baked anything, and I was pretty crappy at first. Like, I was the person who would set the smoke alarm off trying to make scrambled eggs. I was never taught how to cook or anything, but I am a very visually artistic person and wanted to make all of the fancy things. I just read a lot and watched a lot of YouTube and eventually figured it out.
KC: Warren told me that you were on the Netflix show, “Nailed It!” Can you tell me about that experience?
JS: OH NO WARREN! (*laughs) I used to post a lot on Reddit (I don’t anymore now that I’m on my feet all day) and someone reached out to me through one of my posts saying they were a casting director for some production company. I definitely didn’t believe them and thought they were just a random person on the Internet, but they sent me some proof. I thought it seemed like a cool opportunity, and I couldn’t see why not... I interviewed and tried out and ended up on the show!!
KC: I can’t wait to watch your episode!
JS: You REALLY don’t have to watch it EVER!!!
KC: What was the premise of this show?
JS: My episode is in Season 2 but they shot everything at the same time. The show hadn’t come out at all when they reached out to me, and so I wasn’t entirely sure what the premise was. But it’s actually for people who don’t know how to bake (even though I did haha). It’s a chill, very good natured comedy baking show.
KC: What is a “behind the scenes” thing that people wouldn’t know just from watching the show?
JS: Oh gosh, what can I legally say? (*laughs) I’ll say something positive – the competition part is very not staged; it’s totally legit. When the judges say, “You have 15 minutes to do this,” they really do start and stop the clock in that time. During the competition they also don’t give you any hints. I used to always think that things were staged or that the competitors would get cheats, but that totally wasn’t the case.
KC: I know for a lot of people our age the thought of quitting their jobs or moving to a new city can be so daunting… do you have any advice for others who might be in a similar situation?
JS: The biggest thing for me was having to face my pride. I had to go from a very well-educated mindset - knowing I was a smart person and thinking I was going to be a doctor - to NOT using my degree and instead doing manual labor. I was super low-key about what I was doing in the first few months because I was so scared that I wouldn’t find a job or it wouldn’t work out and I would have to go crawling back home to Michigan at the end of the summer explaining to everyone that I hated it or it didn’t work out. I really only told people that I was close with or interacted with in person, and kept it extremely vague on social media. I posted that I was in California but not at all about what I was doing.
Since then, though, there hasn’t been a single person that I’ve talked to who has reacted negatively. Especially people our age, I thought I would hear a lot more judgment about it, but everyone’s been really supportive, and I feel like if I had known that from the beginning it would have been a lot less scary. I thought I was doing something socially unacceptable but I’ve realized no one actually cares that much about any other person’s life anyway (except maybe your parents)! As long as you’re happy people tend to be happy for you.
KC: Do you see yourself continuing with baking for a while?
JS: Absolutely! I really, REALLY like the place where I’m working right now, so I definitely plan to stay at this job for a few more years. I don’t have a long-term trajectory in mind at all, which is a little scary, but it also gives me a lot of freedom. Especially considering before, where I thought I would be in medical school for four years and then go wherever I could get a residency and then go wherever I could get a fellowship AND THEN go wherever I could get a job. It’s a nice freedom but also a scary freedom because I’m sure I won’t stay here forever. If I ever want to run my own business, I’ll want to move because it’s just too expensive to do that in the Bay Area.
KC: That’s amazing, though! People (myself included) tend to over plan and not allow for that freedom…
JS: I’m definitely the kind of person who over plans, so it’s a very foreign feeling to be like, “I don’t actually have a solid plan!” Don’t get me wrong, I have direction and goals, but I don’t know where they’ll take place.
KC: What do you wish someone had told you when you were in school about a career in medicine that you didn’t learn until later on?
JS: I will say that if I had gone to medical school, I probably wouldn’t have regretted it. I would have been a lot more stressed than I am now but likely equally as happy. But medical school is something that you need to be 100% committed to because it takes so long and requires so much stress. Having a plan B made me feel like I wasn’t 100% committed. I also couldn’t help thinking, “What if I start and it’s not what I want to do and I just can’t handle that level of pressure, but then I’m already $50,000 in debt… what could I even do to pay it off?” It was a decision for me of wanting to explore the other plans first and knowing that I could always reapply to medical school later if I wanted to.
Once my social and professional circles after undergrad expanded, I met a lot of students and residents who had started medical school when they were 25 or 26 years old. That alleviated the pressure of feeling like I needed to get on this career track NOW. I felt I could explore other interests first, and that has worked out extremely well!
JEN’S FAVORITES
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5/1/19