I recently read an essay on this site by a Ph.D. in the humanities who had resorted to mowing lawns for a living after several unsuccessful years on the job market. As a performing musician, one advantage I have is that it's possible to be professionally active without being in academe. Many musicians pursue careers in orchestras or opera houses, or prefer to freelance in major cities. A faculty job teaching music is by no means the universal career goal in my field.
After finishing my doctorate in musical arts, I spent five years freelancing in a major city in Europe. In doing so, I deliberately rejected the option of applying for teaching jobs: I didn't want to be one of those people for whom academe is the only way of life. I wanted to be active in the "real" world, away from the rarefied atmosphere of the university campus.
I also wanted to make music on my own terms, and be free to pursue my own ideas of reaching the public without the constraints of an academic infrastructure, and without the demands a teaching position would place on my time.
Once I had indulged in a few years of that freedom, however, I started to gain renewed respect for the academic lifestyle and the benefits it offers. I was getting worn down from all the effort it takes to do things on my own terms.
The very lack of infrastructure and institutional affiliation meant that many performance opportunities were unavailable to me, and I therefore had to keep creating new ones for myself. Furthermore, the academic structure in the European city where I had been living was very different from that in the United States. I had the definite impression that as far as many employers in Europe were concerned, my hard-earned "D.M.A." translated into "Doesn't Mean Anything."
So, fueled entirely by selfish motivations, I decided to switch gears and last year completed my first search for a job in academe back home. By the time I started looking, I had come full circle: I was positively hungry for the academic lifestyle.
In Europe, I had learned to live on practically nothing, and even a modest starting salary sounded generous to me. I decided to start a job search the day it dawned on me that I'd be relieved to earn enough money to actually pay taxes. Furthermore, I realized that a teaching job would offer me many key benefits for my career: wonderful facilities, faculty-development grants, and built-in performance opportunities.
I also coveted the lifestyle of my professorial friends: nice houses, lots of vacation time, offices, parking stickers, high-speed Internet access. To have this, I realized grimly, I would have to be willing to leave my glorious city in Europe and place my geographic destiny in the hands of the job-market gods.
Well, I didn't get my ideal job. Yet what surprised me most was how close I came.
From the beginning I placed few restrictions on my search, applying for everything in my field. I avoided only those few places where I absolutely could not imagine ever living, even in my worst nightmare. That only eliminated two jobs.
I ended up sending out 16 applications between October 2003 and May 2004. Because I was applying from Europe and had been out of the market for several years, I had no real expectation that my search would lead anywhere.
I was not only shocked to land five telephone interviews and four campus interviews, but exhilarated to become a finalist for a teaching position at a liberal-arts college in the East. For years, I had cited the college as the embodiment of my ideal academic employer, and had used it as a standard against which I measured every listing or opportunity I heard about. The institution was exactly where I would like to teach and grow old. And suddenly I had a shot at it.
The campus interview went splendidly, the position surpassed my expectations, the students were wonderful, and I left the college at the end of my two-day interview feeling reasonably confident that I had nailed it.
All did not go according to my script, however, when the search-committee head called to tell me the panel had chosen someone else, someone with much more experience than I have.
Drearily, I continued my search, convinced that I had seen paradise and that every position from there on out would suffer by comparison. The other interviews were different kinds of institutions -- a Big Ten university, a research university in the Southwest, and a midsize college with a regional program.
It didn't take me long to realize that there are many jobs out there that are more suited to me than my dream job ever was. In fact, later in the spring, I was a finalist for a position that seemed even more perfect. I revised my internal measuring tape and started calling it my new dream job. I didn't get that one either, but I was starting to understand that the field is full of surprises and that there are many more good jobs out there than I had ever realized.
Although I began my search thinking mainly of my material well-being, I quickly learned, over the course of my interviews, that there were other, infinitely more valuable reasons to have an academic job. I am grateful to the search committees I spoke with for their insightful questions, which helped me to start thinking more clearly about the academic lifestyle. What started off as a quest to return to the United States for financial reasons turned into an opportunity to re-examine my artistic and professional values.
Being outside the academy and hearing the questions from interviewers focused my attention on the best aspect of being a professor instead of a freelancer: The opportunity to contribute to society, to shape young minds. You know, the trite stuff.
But at this point in my academic career (i.e., the beginning), there is something to that idealistic chatter. The performing arts differ from the rest of academe in that we are part of an oral tradition. We are, in a sense, tradespeople who transmit our skills from teacher to student. A college position would enable me to redirect that considerable part of my energy that was currently focused on getting my next gig to nourishing the spiritual life of the next generation of musicians. Even if most students don't become professional musicians, it is still possible to help cultivate in them an experience with their instrument that is deeply meaningful to them.
Furthermore, the job interviews forced me to think hard about my own approach to my instrument and my specific ideas about teaching. I have taught music students ever since I was an undergraduate, and the vocabulary of teaching has always come naturally to me. I communicate easily and feel that I connect well with students. But the opportunity to think through my approach in such detail and to imagine what goals I might have for my students over the course of several years of private study had an immediate positive impact on my studio teaching, regardless of whether I received a job offer or not.
Late last spring, very late in the job season, after I had given up hope of being hired, I got a job. It happened just like people say it does: unexpectedly. I wasn't feeling overly keyed up about the interview, but the campus visit felt perfectly natural, and I was lucky. It falls short of my ultimate goal in that it is not on the tenure track, so I find myself in the unusual postion of settling into a new city while planning ahead for my imminent next step: I will launch another job search from here.
This time I believe I will have the "right" attitude from the outset. Although I now have the salary (admittedly small), the vacations, the facilities, and the nice home in a college town, I am now aware of the reason I am in this crazy field after all.
I no longer have a clear idea of what and where my ideal job is, but somewhere I hope there will be a position where I can do some good, where I can contribute some of my experience, and where students will benefit from my presence. That is the most I can hope for, and certainly an essential ingredient for a worthwhile career.
