Unforeseen

I would like to begin by thanking the organizer for inviting me to contribute to this colloquy, whose topic is near and dear to me—if not consciously, certainly experientially. Throughout my career, I have regularly moved between academic and “nonacademic” positions. Though I presently hold a tenured faculty position, my primary role now is nonacademic (by which I mean nonscholarly or nonpedagogical) as an administrator at an academic institution.I use scare quotes above because I have never quite perceived the categories at hand—academic versus “nonacademic”—as discrete and have always understood, and experienced, a great deal of fluidity between them. For this, and for many other things, I am deeply grateful. My experience has always been that there is a high degree of permeability between these categories, and I am deeply fortunate that my work in one of these categories has consistently informed my work in the other.In hindsight, my first “nonacademic” position came even before I had started down the pathway toward an academic career. In Bloomington, Indiana, where I completed my undergraduate studies, there was an organization called the Camerata Orchestra, founded and run by a wonderful woman and concertmaster named Lenore Hatfield. In addition to engaging me to play tuba in the orchestra, Ms. Hatfield hired me to serve as a sort of jack-of-all-trades assistant, helping out with everything from personnel-related matters to postconcert receptions. It was my first experience with anything that might be called “arts administration,” and it ignited in me an abiding interest not only in the aesthetic or creative domains of the arts but the more workaday, logistical realities too.Upon graduating from Indiana, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I enrolled in the graduate program in musicology at the University of California at Berkeley. As is the case for many new graduate students, I am sure, my first year in the program was at once tremendously exciting and highly disorienting, as I came to realize how little I knew about the aims, methods, and boundaries of my new discipline. I found a sort of grounding by continuing, on the side, arts administrative work. Ari Solotoff, an old friend from a wonderful summer music camp in Vermont called Kinhaven that I had attended while in high school, told me about a paid internship position at the San Francisco Symphony where he had been working. I applied for and was offered the position and began working there in the summer following my first year of graduate school.Over the next several years, I continued pursuing various arts administrative opportunities all the while pursuing my graduate studies in musicology at Berkeley—first with the San Francisco Symphony, then through various projects undertaken in partnership with organizations such as Cal Performances, and eventually with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, a new music organization where I served as part-time project developer and grant writer while completing my PhD dissertation.Throughout all of this, I was extraordinarily fortunate to have an advisor who not only tolerated but supported these interests—and, more to the point, supported me in my pursuit of them. Richard Taruskin was the reason I went to Berkeley to begin with, as I wanted to study Russian music with him. Even before I did, Taruskin saw how the various hats I wore—musicology graduate student by day, budding arts administrator on the side—were in fact flip sides of the same coin, each set of pursuits reinforcing and informing the other. “If you want to know how the sausage is made,” as Taruskin once remarked to me, “no better way than to make it.” For my administrative work, my grounding in musicology lent an invaluable critical awareness and an important historical perspective. For my work as a musicologist, my experiences as an administrator helped me appreciate more fully, through firsthand experience, the degree to which musical life is profoundly shaped not just by ideas but through a host of mediating elements: financial, regulatory, technological, institutional, and more. Indeed, it was largely my experiences as an administrator that ultimately led me to my dissertation topic, which concerned changes in the careers and institutional landscape for composers in Russia following the Soviet collapse and the implications of these changes for their artistic work. I still remember Taruskin characterizing my administrative work at a new music ensemble in San Francisco, while writing up my dissertation, as participant observation—a characterization I have come to appreciate more fully over the years.Though I was blessed with an advisor who was tremendously supportive of my nontraditional pursuits, my decision intentionally to pursue an administrative career track (rather than a traditional academic one) nevertheless generated within me a great deal of anxiety. Upon completing my PhD, I was fortunate to have an extraordinary multiyear postdoctoral fellowship at a university abroad, followed by a fixed-term teaching appointment at a school in the United States. For a while, I was searching both for academic and nonacademic positions. At a certain point, and for a variety of reasons—personal, professional, and more—I decided solely to pursue nonacademic positions. Though I knew this decision was right for my family and me, the notion brought with it a fair bit of apprehension. Truth be told, I did not announce this decision to anyone in musicology at the time—perhaps I was afraid of being ostracized. Rather, I waited to share any news until I had landed a position—in this case, a development position at a regional orchestra. I remember my tremendous nervousness telling Taruskin that I had accepted this position. Even though all of my experience to date suggested he would be wholly supportive, I could not help but feel like somehow I would be disappointing him. True to form, and in line with all of my experiences with him to that point (and after), he was fully supportive of my chosen path. (“Bilchik,” I remember Taruskin saying, “now more than ever we need people fighting for classical music, and if that's what you're going to do, you have my full support.”)I share parts of my story here not only as a general way of responding to the topic at hand but, more specifically, to respond to that part of the colloquy prompt asking about how one's doctoral work helps and, especially, hinders future career paths. In my experience (and I suspect I may not be alone), the biggest challenges by far when contemplating nonacademic career paths are internal. For better or for worse, many of us who pursue graduate school and set down paths toward academic careers perceive our work not as a mere profession but as a vocation, more akin to a religious calling than an occupational pursuit. Opting to pursue a different career path is thus often experienced not merely as a professional change but a profound identity shift, with all the twists, turns, and bumps one might expect.It can be scary and disorienting stuff even under the best of circumstances. If we as a field are to be serious about supporting our students, the more we can do to lower these emotional barriers and better support students encountering them, the better. This need not necessarily require any large-scale initiatives per se as much as small, ongoing shifts in our day-to-day interactions and the cultures we foster as teachers, advisors, administrators, and even fellow graduate students. This might mean celebrating a wider variety of alumni achievements (not merely tenure-track academic appointments), regularly inviting to campus alumni or others who work in nonacademic positions to talk with students, creating peer-mentorship programs pairing graduate students and alumni, and more.Beyond any psychological barriers for individuals considering a career move outside of academia, numerous quotidian matters routinely come into play, too, sometimes in rather vexing ways. When talking with academics looking to pursue nonacademic job opportunities, one question that often emerges is whether or not to include one's PhD on one's resume. The question is rooted in a fear that the PhD might send negative signals to a prospective employer—that the candidate is “overqualified” or “overtrained” or perhaps a higher-than-usual flight risk, with pokers in other fires and commitments lying elsewhere. (My strong advice: Include it, for all kinds of reasons!) Relatedly, academics looking to make a career change often feel themselves “overcredentialed” but “underexperienced.” When scholars have taken on various short-term jobs to “pay the bills” (e.g., while finishing one's dissertation or while between positions), they often wonder whether or not to include them on a resume, trying to weigh the perceived risks of including “filler jobs” on one hand (would their inclusion have a negative “branding effect” for the potential candidate?) versus the perils of a resume gap on the other.When encountering these and related questions, my strong advice is not to go it alone. Find someone who has walked down similar paths and ask for help. In my experience (on both sides of the equation), individuals are more than willing—nay, eager—to connect and help. I still recall a lunch I had, while still in my PhD program, with an arts administrator who kindly accepted my invitation to spend some time together solely so that I could learn more about his career path and seek his advice for forging a similar path for myself, and from which I emerged with a palpable feeling of camaraderie, excitement, hope, and inspiration. When preparing materials, an outside pair of eyes—especially ones belonging to someone who has walked down a similar path—on one's resume or cover letter can be highly beneficial, and the feeling of kinship, connection, and support that ensues is invaluable. To individuals on the hiring side of the equation, I urge us all to be as open minded as possible when considering candidates, thinking broadly about suitable qualifications, experience, and prerequisites.One final thought: In retrospect, it is often easier to discern throughlines, points of connection, or common themes—between research and vocational interests, different career experiences, and more—that were difficult if not impossible to see at the time. I now see a clear narrative over the course of my career, with little categorical difference between my work as a scholar (whose research focuses largely on how institutions shape culture) and an administrator (working within those institutions). Looking back, I can trace one long, continuous career arc, with moves between scholarly and administrative positions less a shift or interruption as much as a rotation or pivot along an unbroken path.But this is hindsight, in which everything is 20/20. At the time, and at virtually each step along the way, I felt a great deal of uncertainty and even confusion about potential pathways forward. Though I perceive a cohesive thread weaving throughout my career experiences, I certainly perceived no such thing at the time. (Neither was I necessarily concerned with such questions of meaning: For much of the time, I simply wanted, and needed, a job!)I say these things not to set up any kind of profound bit of advice but rather to say: If you are feeling lost, you are not alone, and it certainly does not mean you are doing something “wrong.” As the saying goes, we often compare our insides to other people's outsides. Although it can often seem as if everyone has everything figured out, in reality, most everyone is figuring things out step-by-step as they go along. In her book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott cites E. L. Doctorow's description of writing a novel as akin to driving a car at night, during which “you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”2 As Lamott continues, “You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.”3 I agree. And, I might add, sometimes visibility isn't two or three feet but can only be measured in inches. This has certainly been my experience, as I suspect it has been for virtually everyone who has pursued a career inside or outside the academy. The most important thing we can do is be gentle and compassionate with ourselves and with others making the drive.