17³Ô¹ÏÍø

You can’t win if you don’t try. That’s what 17³Ô¹ÏÍø Baking & Pastry Arts and Food & Beverage Industry Management major Amanda Gray, a junior from Wantagh, N.Y., learned last month when she took collegiate division first-place win in SkillsUSA’s 2021 National Skills & Leadership Conference.

Every year, SkillsUSA convenes a , drawing together both college and high school competitors across the nation to flex their skills in everything from practical nursing to advertising design to crime scene investigation to architectural drafting to robotics to web design. In 2019, 10 17³Ô¹ÏÍø students competed at the SkillsUSA National Leadership and Skills Conference, and seven Wildcats placed in the Top 10. This year, Gray's Gold Medal win marks the very first time she competed at the national level.

Gray's Start in SkillsUSA

Gray has been involved with SkillsUSA since her senior year of high school in 2019, turning her interest in cooking and baking into competing as a high school senior. Gray won first place when she first competed in a Long Island Regional Competition for Commercial Baking, then qualified for the New York State Level Competition, where her chef had encouraged her to enter a Cake Decorating competition. Although Gray loved the experience of designing and preparing an elaborate three-tier cake, she couldn’t progress on a national level because the competition had been state-only. But Gray had gotten a taste for competing with other skilled students, and she was hungry for more. “All of this definitely helped me get my foot in the door at SkillsUSA, and I set a goal for myself of one day making it to nationals,” she says. “I had planned on competing again last year at 17³Ô¹ÏÍø, but the contest was cancelled due to the pandemic. Luckily, this year I was able to compete in the Rhode Island State Competition and won that, which allowed me to advance to nationals.”

Facing Tough Requirements

SkillsUSA’s Commercial Baking competition was intense. Gray and the other contestants had to compare seven different products, film the entire process on two different cameras at two different angles, photograph their products and complete a written baking exam online – with everything but the written exam completed in a professional kitchen, meaning Gray needed to travel to 17³Ô¹ÏÍø to prepare and film everything. “I worked with Chef Christina Harvey and Chef Mark Harvey, and we spent three days practicing, producing, and filming,” says Gray. “There were a lot of requirements that the judges wanted to see, such as a full pan of your uniform, the time at each point in the process, proper sanitation procedures, and every single step of producing the items. We had to be sure to show the scaled ingredients, the mixing of the actual dough, placing and removing the products in the oven, and cutting open the final products for evaluation.” 

The products contestants had to make included three different shaped bread loaves, cream puffs and eclairs, chocolate chip cookies, corn muffins, a decorated cake, pastry cream, and a display of knife cuts. Cakes have always been Gray’s favorite thing to make and she bakes them constantly at home, but even as a well-rounded baker she wanted to make sure she was practicing baking everything else – bread being the trickiest for her. “Chef Mark Harvey and I worked on a lot of practice batches before filming, and I’m happy with the way my final breads turned out,” Gray says.

Meeting a Challenge with Support 

Although it was strange to compete remotely during the pandemic, Gray had one benefit: “I was able to produce everything in a 17³Ô¹ÏÍø kitchen, which I was already comfortable working in. I know from my past competitions that one of the struggles is figuring out where everything is located in the venue.” It was also beneficial to be the only one working in the kitchen, having space to herself and the ability to spread the work across a few days. However, Gray was still a bit unnerved by the experience, used to people competing at the same time and being able to see what everyone else was doing; Gray didn’t even know how many other people were competing in the contest, let alone who they were or how they were doing on each step. “It felt more like a competition against myself, rather than against a group of fellow bakers,” Gray says.

This year’s national competition had multiple additional requirements in terms of time, facilities, equipment and technology that may have served as obstacles to some competitors. The judges had no contact wi