What a Bakery Taught Me That Law School Couldn’t 

If you had asked me a few months ago where I’d be spending my summer, I probably would have said in an office, surrounded by case files, legal research and endless cups of coffee. Instead, I found myself surrounded by flour and excel sheets. 

As a law student, interning at an artisan bakery wasn’t exactly the obvious next step. Friends were understandably confused. “A bakery?” they’d ask, usually followed by, “What exactly are you going to do there?” 

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure either. I’ve always loved baking. Like many home bakers, I spent weekends experimenting in the kitchen, for the perfect cookie and the softest bread, convincing myself that buying yet another whisk was somehow essential. I had no doubts about my passion for baking, what I wanted to find out was whether my interest extended beyond the mixing bowl and into the realities of actually running a bakery. 

So, I walked into Miche expecting to learn about production and operations. What I didn’t expect was to also learn so much about people. It didn’t take long for me to realise one thing, people care about bread. Not in a passing way, but deeply. I used to have this quiet assumption, I think a lot of us carry it without saying it out loud, that the “real world,” the world of courtrooms and contracts, doesn’t have room for something as small as baking. That baking is a nice hobby, a soft thing, something you do on the side while the actual important work happens elsewhere. And that got me thinking about what actually keeps people going. 

You lose a case. Or in my world right now, you mess up an exam, you get a comment back from a professor that stings more than it should, you fumble the oral rounds of a moot competition that you’d rehearsed a hundred times. The stuff that’s supposed to matter, the “real” work, has a way of taking something out of you that doesn’t get replaced by more of the same work. What replaces it, more often than anyone admits, is something much smaller. A good sandwich, or a warm slice of cake. The kind you didn’t have to think about, that someone else made with actual care, that fixes something. Not the problem. Just you, for the twenty minutes it takes to eat it, and I refuse to believe that moment is trivial. 

On the operations side, I learned the less romantic half of that, how much invisible discipline it takes to make sure that loaf, that small moment in someone’s terrible day, is available and consistent. Before a single loaf reaches a customer, there’s production planning, inventory management, packaging, logistics, customer communication, quality checks and dozens of tiny decisions that most people, including me, never think about. Every loaf represents far more than flour, water and salt. It represents coordination between people who all care deeply about getting the little details right. 

Perhaps my favourite discovery, though, was understanding what “artisan” really means. Before this internship, I knew the word was associated with craft-focused baking. But now I know how much weight that carries. It means choosing the slower route when a faster one exists. It means making fresh bread every day instead of relying on preservatives. It means paying attention to details that most customers may never notice but would certainly miss if they disappeared. Artisan baking isn’t just about making bread by hand. It’s about making conscious choices to not cut corners.

I think I went into this internship assuming I’d have to justify it, explain to people why a future lawyer spent her summer in a bakery instead of a firm. I don’t feel like I need to anymore. I watched people’s whole moods shift over a piece of bread. I watched a business survive on the same instincts good lawyering survives on : care, consistency, someone doing all that unglamorous work. And I relearned, in a very specific and unexpected way, that the things that keep people going are rarely the big dramatic wins. They’re small, cared-for things.

Whether or not I ever find myself back in a professional bakery, one thing is certain, I’ll always carry these lessons with me. Once you’ve seen the care that goes into making honest, freshly baked bread every single day, it’s hard to settle for anything less. So, I may not know where my career will take me next, but now I’ll always know where to buy my bread.

– Riya Mirchandani
Intern, Summer 2026