FIRST PERSON

Reinventing Myself Again

The economy can be a cruel mistress, particularly, it seems, to a performing artist

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines An Academic in America On Stupidity, Part 2 Exactly how should we teach the 'digital natives'? First Person Polished Applications Nothing stunts civility like graduate-student insecurities and competition. gift. Career News Fish in the Shallows Stanley Fish would like professors to impart knowledge without viewpoint. Even if that were possible, it would be undesirable. gift. First Person The Welcome Mat On his first day on the job, an assistant professor is handed an unusual gift. 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 MICHELLE PARKER

What should you do when everything that you've tried to secure a teaching job has fallen short? Can you do anything at all?

My search for a place in academe — specifically, a tenure-track job in a music program — has been a rough ride for the past three years. This spring, having lost my temper for the billionth time with the process of applying for university positions, I decided to focus my attention on winning a performance job.

I practiced six to eight hours a day for two months. I taped myself and listened to the playback for mistakes. I consulted friends and colleagues, drove my neighbors crazy with my practicing, and inadvertently taught my male cockatiel Igor how to whistle one of the excerpts.

When the day came for my big interview with an orchestra, I was nervous but felt ready to tackle the audition with confidence. The result? Veni, vidi, vici. Or, perhaps more accurately, Veni, lascivi, vici: I came, I played, I conquered. I left the audition feeling like a champ and when my phone rang a week later, I knew it was going to be good news.

And it was, at least for a while. I had won the job, which, although it didn't pay very well, and I would be living in a really unpleasant area, was still a job. Flush with the thought of being gainfully employed, I starting looking for an apartment and packing my belongings.

But then my phone rang again, less than two weeks before I was supposed to move.

This time the news wasn't so good: The orchestra, which had been having financial difficulties amid the decline in the economy, was filing for bankruptcy. Effective immediately.

And with that, and a quiet apology from the personnel manager, my new job was gone. Even worse, so was my hope for my immediate future.

Feeling both desperate and angry, I started calling colleagues in the hope of stirring up an adjunct position at one of my city's numerous universities. The response was always the same: We would hire you if we could, but our department's budget has been slashed/severely cut/wiped out. One person, upon hearing my story, softly chuckled and replied, "Don't feel too bad. My position at Local Tech was just eliminated because of budget cuts."

So now what?

I went through the usual response stages: anger, denial, depression, and entertaining the thought of running away to Tibet and becoming a yak herder. But feeling sorry for oneself doesn't pay the bills, and with my checkbook starting to feel thin and my car needing to be fed, I decided to think a bit more rationally.

The economy can be a cruel mistress, particularly, it seems, to performing artists. Music, especially live music, is still a luxury to most people, so when times are tough, the tough stop supporting their local performing groups.

I'm tired of fighting with academe and performing at poorly run auditions, but I'm also tired of running around in circles. So I've decided to reinvent myself. Much like reinventing the wheel or building a better mousetrap, you can change only so much. The right changes however, can make all the difference in the world.

My first change was to find a new source of (pocket) change. I immediately applied to a temp service and have landed a succession of short-term jobs that have enabled me to keep the creditors comfortably at bay. Being a secretary or receptionist may not be what my musical training or my doctorate in musical arts were intended for, but income is income.

Once I had a new source of financial support, I began to rethink my desire to be a university professor and reconsider what it means to be a music teacher. Although I never thought I would do it, I've started the process of applying for a license to teach at a public school.

I had always thought of music education at the K-12 level as dull and unchallenging, work fit for music majors who couldn't cut it in performance, theory, or musicology. However, faced with a tanking economy and three empty years on the academic-job circuit, I'm learning to swallow my pride and re-evaluate being a schoolteacher. It's still not my idea of a great job, but again, it pays.

As I contemplated my reincarnation as a schoolteacher, I also decided to take a colleague's advice and start applying for teaching jobs overseas. After visiting the Web sites of several international schools, I have found that foreign job opportunities in music seem much more plentiful, with better pay and benefits. I've already had some near misses on job offers, but, considering that my new batting average for callbacks is higher than my academic one, I'll keep trying.

So far, so good on the makeover front. But since part of me still cries out for an idyllic life in academe, I decided to take another hard look at my research.

My largest project, which has involved transforming my dissertation into a book, is almost done. All that remains is for my copyright-permission requests to be granted, which, at the rate things are going, may take 10 more years.

In the meantime, I decided it might be a good idea to re-examine some of my older papers and projects for their publishing potential. What I've found has been (thankfully) surprisingly good; some of them are on topics that have not been addressed in my field. So I am rewriting several articles for submission to various journals. Those creations may not help with my finances but they are definitely good for my academic soul, as well as my CV.

Finally, since I am still a performer at heart, I am reinventing myself, going back to my wilder days as a klezmer-playing graduate student. Thanks to the Internet, I have been able to assemble a small band that plays fairly darn well together. Even better, we're being booked for gigs on a regular basis.

Those jobs, together with my private-tutoring clients and classical-music gigs, give me the freedom to buy music supplies when I need them, rather than having to decide between spending the remainder of my monthly budget on groceries or reeds.

Being able to play klezmer again has been wonderfully liberating. It provides a much-needed release some days, and since it is frowned upon by many "straight classical musicians" in my field, it gives me the chance to quietly thumb my nose at them. Sometimes a little rebellion is a good thing, even in the most uptight of academe hopefuls.

Looking at all of this, I find myself shaking my head. Am I really reinventing myself? Or have I simply created a new mess out of everything? I hope it's the former — and, at the moment, my bank account confirms that.

I also hope that this personal reincarnation will give new life to my search for an academic or orchestra job come fall. As those annoying inspirational posters often say, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade." I may not be making lemonade at the moment, but limeade is close enough, right?

Michelle Parker is the pseudonym of a professional musician with a doctorate of musical arts who has been chronicling her search for a tenure-track job at a music school. You can read her previous columns: Part Musician, Part Academic, The Favor of a Reply Is Requested, and Playing the Field.