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How Home Baker and Medical Student Daniela Rodriguez Balances It All
Before throwing herself into the baking world, Columbia born Daniela Rodriguez moved to the United States at a young age and spent most of her childhood in Northern California. A quick fast-forward to 2021 will show us that Rodriguez is successfully pursuing medical school as she uses baking as a therapeutic outlet in her life in Chicago.
Three years ago, Rodriguez uprooted her life in small town Lodi, California to delve into the medical field in The Windy City away from her close-knit family of 5. Despite growing up as the middle child, Rodriguez carried on the responsibilities of an older sibling for her younger sister and older brother. As her younger sister is relishing in enjoying her college years and her older brother is pursuing a career in music, her time is now occupied by fulfilling her responsibilities in her fourth year of medical school, which will soon be followed by the beginning of her residency.
"In medical school you don’t start specializing until residency, which is specialized training after medical school, so I’m not specializing in anything just yet...I plan on doing Internal Medicine. I have not always wanted to. I wanted to do all sorts of things growing up, I kind of just stumbled into medicine and ended up really liking it and feeling like I could do a lot of good, so I pursued it".
As Rodriguez navigates her way around a scalpel, she found herself rekindling an on again off again relationship with baking. After building a life in Chicago aside her boyfriend, Rodriguez started baking again in her second year of medical school. Despite being overwhelmed by the stress of school, baking helped her shut out the rest of the world in order to focus on a smaller project at a temperature of 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Baking relaxes me, because it doesn’t allow me to think about all the other million things I should be doing, and just be present in the moment...In baking, I get inspired by the idea of a challenge with a tangible outcome. I like going through the process, getting into all the details, and then coming out on the other side with this beautiful, sweet creation. I think baking gives me a lot of what I don’t get in medicine to be honest," she admits, "Medicine is hard, but not for the reasons everyone thinks . All of those things are true, of course, but that’s not necessarily why it’s all so taxing...You go through the hardest 4 years of your life and then come out the other end thinking you’ll finally be okay and be able to do some good in the world, but then instead you’re thrown into a system that is so broken and quite frankly harmful to both patients and doctors, that it {kinda} just kills your love for the profession."
As a baker, Rodriguez is awarded with a keen attention to detail thanks to her natural instincts as a perfectionist. Her routine in her recipe movie montage consists of repeatedly reviewing her plans and putting her quick learning skills to the tests. On the other hand, like any baker, sometimes the heat of the kitchen can get too hot.
"I’m an amateur. I mean there are a million things I don’t know. People spend their whole lives dedicated to perfecting baking, and as much as I would love to do that, I just don’t have that bandwidth in my life...I will say that I don’t have a lot of patience with myself, and if I don’t do things perfectly right away, I get really annoyed with myself."
In a world where TikTok is the new black, this California native began exploring a new creative side to her through baking. After finding unexpected excitement making TikToks, she has been able to create videos to share with her 9,000 followers including The Great American Cupcake Road Trip where she bakes cupcakes with flavors highlighting the personality of popular American cities starting off with espresso cupcakes for Seattle and ending with Macadamia Nut cupcakes for Honolulu.
"The best part was researching all the different cities and seeing how proud everybody was about their cities when I would post a cupcake for their region. I will 100% be doing another American road trip at some point," states Rodriquez. "Honestly, the idea just kind of popped into my head one day... I know that sounds {kinda} dumb, but I just thought it would be cool to take some representative foods from around the country and cupcake-ify them. And it seriously turned out so much better than I imagined. I’m itching to do another road trip. Maybe with something savory this time!"
While Daniela Rodriguez finds her footing in the hospital halls, she tours the streets of the country through the comfort of her kitchen and drifts through the Windy City. Pursuing a career in the medical field takes an amount of diligence and psychological maturity that can only be mastered with the right balance of ingredients in the recipe. The eclairs and the scones on her TikTok allow her to successfully create a sanctuary for herself outside of the hospital for the reflection and self care needed for proper survival.
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