First Person

A Career-Making Performance

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines An Academic in America Yearning After Books Why are so many artists and writers preoccupied by the so-called demise of bookish culture? First Person What Am I Doing? Shouldn't seven years of graduate school have helped me avoid taking a job just to have a job? Career News Too Much Information Colleges encourage the use of cellphones for emergency-alert purposes, but professors have begun to worry that students can use their phones during exams to cheat off the Web. First Person Moving a Step (or 3) Up the Ladder Why would a newly tenured associate professor in the sciences decide to go on the job market? Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Lauren Bailey

Sometimes I feel like I'm living too many lives at once.

I am an assistant professor of music in my first real teaching job. I am learning the ins and outs of academic life -- like how to balance the many competing demands on my time and how to navigate the treacherous political waters of my department.

I am a mentor. As an instrumental-music teacher, I have an unusually close relationship with my students, by virtue of the fact that I meet with each of them individually every week. In addition to teaching them how to become more accomplished musicians, I help them with summer-festival and grant applications. I am also recruiting new students in an attempt to build a bigger class.

I am a job seeker. My current teaching gig is a one-year renewable position. I can stay on if I want. But despite my initial delight with the job, I am now recognizing its limitations. So I have refined the art of tailoring a cover letter to a specific job description. I scour the ads every week. I am in frequent contact with my references. Behind the scenes I am working feverishly to move up a rung in academe.

Finally, I am a performing musician. Unlike many academics who discovered their love for their discipline in high school or college, I have been playing music seriously since childhood. My identity is intertwined with my instrument. Practicing is not an optional activity for me. If I were to let it go, I would lose an important component of myself, which would affect everything else I do.

So far this year I have applied for 12 tenure-track jobs. Three of them were wildly unrealistic. One search was canceled after the deadline. So that leaves me with eight viable jobs in my field, although I am still sending out applications.

Early on, I had a nibble from a church-affiliated, liberal-arts college. I had to write a two-page response to the college's mission statement. I guess the hiring committee decided that my values didn't mesh with the college's, as I never received a reply.

Just when I was giving up hope, two other institutions contacted me to request telephone interviews. They couldn't have been more different. One is a large state university; the other, a prestigious private one.

I have always found phone interviews to be unnerving because it is difficult to get a sense of what the people on the search committee are like. They are disembodied voices tonelessly reading canned questions, which I then struggle to answer, talking into the void of a speakerphone.

Over time, I have written down every question I have been asked in both phone and live interviews -- in essence creating my own study manual. A typical search committee in instrumental music will be interested in a finite number of topics, and I have thought out answers for each category.

In phone interviews, I have learned how to keep myself "on message." I print out phrases I want to try to use, cut them apart, and scatter them all over my desk, grouped by category. "Recruiting" phrases might be in one corner, "goals" in the middle, and "teaching philosophy" on the far edge. Because I can't read and talk at the same time, I then color-code the categories so I can easily find the catchwords during the interview.

After a few disastrous experiences last year, I started practicing my phone-interview technique. A typical session goes like this: About 45 minutes before the actual appointment with the search committee, my husband, who is also heavily invested in my job search, calls me with a list of questions in hand and poses them via speakerphone. He singlehandedly pretends to be a search committee and asks me five different questions from the list, adopting a different accent for each one. While I, at times, have to stifle my urge to laugh, it has proved an excellent exercise, and I now feel much more confident in phone interviews.

This time around, both interviews went well. I felt a good rapport with the committee members.

One of the interviews in particular was a pleasant surprise: The search committee actually initiated an unscripted, 30-minute discussion with me. The members did have a few prepared questions to ask, but mainly they were interested in explaining their expectations and the needs of the department to me, and getting a sense of my thoughts in response.

Weeks later, after I had convinced myself and all my friends that the lines had grown cold and I was back to square one, I received an invitation from both universities to come for a campus interview.

The jobs I'm interviewing for are more appealing to me than my current one, not because they are at fancier institutions or because they pay higher salaries (although they are and they do), but because the job description is more focused.

Currently, I have to wear too many hats. Besides my studio teaching, I have a huge number of administrative responsibilities within the department and am required to teach several classroom courses as well as play many concerts on the campus, both with students and other faculty members.

The two tenure-track jobs I'm up for would require far less of me administratively and allow me to have more time to recruit a good class, to become known in the community and region, and to pursue my own professional development, which would, in turn, help the department. That is my ideal position.

The most daunting aspect of the job search is the fact that I will have to perform a 45-minute solo recital at each of these interviews. Last year as a freelancer, I was able to practice a great deal in preparation for my interview recitals. This year, I have much less time to practice and am hard-pressed to cobble together a program and to learn it in between all of my other responsibilities.

If I were in a different academic field, I would have a job talk tucked away in a drawer, ready to dust off for this season's interviews. An interview recital is the equivalent of a job talk but must be learned anew each time. Even though I've spent hours practicing the repertoire I'm going to play, I still have to practice it all over again, because it is expected that I be at the top of my performing abilities for every interview.

Each committee defines different parameters for the recital, which means that the repertoire I select must be tailored to each interview. As any musician could testify, that dramatically increases the amount of practice time. The spiritual demands cannot be overlooked either. It is not enough to play the music with technical accuracy. You also have to maintain an emotional reservoir from which you can draw if you are to communicate anything at all through the music.

The fact of the matter is, it is largely on the basis of the interview recital that a committee selects the successful candidate.

I have heard academics in other fields discuss the importance of prioritizing their research, and writing a little bit every day so that they may build up enough of a portfolio to eventually earn tenure. Performing musicians have even less choice in the matter. We can't ever coast along on past research or publications. It's not enough to have done it once; we are only as good as what we continue to do.

I am aware that candidates who are still in graduate school have much more practice time at their disposal than I do. I am practicing hard. I can only hope that my "chops" are in good enough shape by the time I go to these interviews. It will be the ultimate litmus test of my ability to maintain high standards as a performer despite my current teaching load.

My most fervent hope is that out of this job search comes the opportunity to live just one single, harmonious life, with the various strands of my existence braided together in a more manageable way.