I started a new job this fall at Boston University and I love it. I am an Assistant Professor of Music (Music Education). My job is mostly to work with graduate students on interesting, challenging topics and publish research in my area of expertise. Basically, my dream job (after International Rock Star, for which there is no application process anyway, and to which I came as close as I ever will this past summer when I played on another obscure album with my best friend in the world, Stephen Wheel).

The second time is a charm

It’s the same job I’d applied and interviewed for three years ago. Back in 2017, I was confounded as to how the committee could have overlooked me, but I think I get it now. The decision most likely reflects the catastrophic pre-interview I had with the Director of the School of Music, who was unable to make my on-campus interview so arranged to meet me in London (where I lived at the time) during his layover en route to Sri Lanka. I was terribly nervous when we met in a café on the South Bank of the River Thames. I regaled him with tales of my exploits as an external examiner in Southeast Asia on behalf of a large English university, and he told me he couldn’t hire anyone who worked to forward such an overtly neo-colonial agenda. I noticed too late that in my anxiety, I was repeatedly squeezing my disposable cup. The bottom fell out, depositing a half-pint of scalding black coffee over my jet-lagged interlocutor’s dress trousers and shoes. I froze in terror and he scuttled off to grab piles of napkins for his legs and to mop the floor. His soothing “don’t worry” fell on deaf ears and I spent the next 20 minutes talking myself into an abyss.

So I was genuinely amazed when in the mid-winter of 2020, I was invited to interview again at BU. I thought I might be the comedy third pick – light relief for the committee so they could enjoy a laugh in between interviewing more serious candidates who had no history of attempting to hospitalize members of their administration. I’d decided, in this tenth year since earning my doctorate, having applied to in excess of 120 higher education institutions for employment, that this would be my final year trying. I’d published dozens of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, started a peer-reviewed journal, given keynotes, presented numerous conference papers, written a book, co-written two books, and edited four books of others’ writing. I’d taught undergrads, masters, and doctoral students, and adjuncted for nine years at Boston University, so I figured there wasn’t much more I could do. Relaxed and ready to quit academia, I mostly enjoyed the grueling interview process and was offered the job.

Starting during a pandemic

I started getting paid during the summer, when technically I wasn’t working in the role yet. This afforded me a honeymoon period of mostly swimming with my family, social distancing, and doing none of the fun travel I had planned for conferences. As luck would have it, Boston University’s music education department had a particularly excellent setup for pandemics already in place when the semester began. All of my teaching this semester was for the online DMA program, so aside from a couple of trips to campus to collect a new laptop and grab lunch outdoors with new colleagues, I – like so many of my peers – have been working from an office in my house this whole time.

I have supportive colleagues who help, piece by piece, to peel away layers of the proverbial institutional onion. Because of my generous, collaborative co-workers, the onion has not made me cry.

My department chair jokes that BU stands for Bureaucracy University. I have been through about 45 rounds of emails and trainings to acquire a university travel card, the irony of which is not lost on me now we are not permitted even to leave the state. One person I hired for a dissertation committee agreed to do the substantial amount of work for free because she felt the time she would have spent filling out paperwork was worth more than the fee she’d be paid. And as for enrolling in “benefits,” I would like to reassure Americans that your system is completely insane. The lists of co-pays, deductibles, co-insurances, HSA’s, and itemized potential eventualities are exhausting. (How and when did “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” become contingent on securing a job with ludicrously overpriced health insurance?!). If I sound like a naïve foreigner, unable to quite grasp the charms of unhinged, extreme capitalism, I confess, and I dunno, it just seems to me some things are more important than turning a profit.

I mostly have no idea what I’m meant to be doing at BU. Actually, that’s untrue. I know exactly what I’m supposed to achieve (I think), but there is an alluring opacity to the processes and culture of reaching these ends. I have learned my guesses are certain to be wrong, but I have supportive colleagues who help, piece by piece, to peel away layers of the proverbial institutional onion. Because of my generous, collaborative co-workers, the onion has not made me cry.

Balancing work and home

The most intense aspect of working at BU is not part of my job at all, but managing my daughter’s virtual second-grade schooling. Last week was an unmitigated shit-show. I don’t think either of us made it to a single meeting on time. I can’t concentrate. I’m monitoring her rotation of 42-minute class periods (why?!?!) and Google meets, helping her re-boot Chrome and her Chromebook, trying to find the right pages in her textbooks, checking and submitting her online assignments, responding to emails from her teacher, reassuring her that her inability as a seven-year-old to remain attentive for the full duration of a mind-numbing 20-minute listening session on (I shit you not) how to cite internet sources in a reference list is not a reflection on her character or intelligence, and telling her I had the same talk with my doctoral students this week and many of them still make APA formatting errors.

So my new job is pretty great. I have a flexible schedule to complete lots of work I find stimulating, with and for people I like, using a laptop the college paid for. I feel fortunate to finally be in a work environment where people hired me because (rather than in spite) of my accomplishments and my plans for the future. I hope to open a research center, write several books, make lots of music, and maybe even travel again one day.