A Peculiar Anniversary
Today marks a peculiar anniversary. As of the 2nd of February, for the first time in my life, I have been at the same job for more than a year.
That’s 366 days of full-time employment on a single, albeit temporary, contract.
It’s a strange thing to first experience in my early 30s. But it’s true. For my entire life, I have either been in school, on limited student contracts, on temporary research contracts, or was laid-off during a role that would have lasted beyond 365 days. I might have made it one year at my server-catering job in Ohio, but I got fired because my manager would not let me off for Father’s Day after working both Christmas and Easter that year. I put my request in, it was ignored, I got canned via a call when I was out with my Dad. No regrets there.
This way of living, as in, feeling like I always need to be thinking about what I am going to do next, has created a lot of instability in my day-to-day and has had a marked effect on how I view my relationship with work.
In some ways it has been good. I have had to be creative and, at times, forcefully pushed out of my comfort zone, resulting in an unusual career path. The unfortunate part is that it’s been an uphill battle to try to be truly interdisciplinary. Moving from a School of Music, to Department of Psychology, to limited research funding, to data science education, to computer science, to where I am now. What I have had to focus on (for research) changes with the job’s responsibilities and expectations, which when constrained by limited contracts, has led to several changes in direction. I am also very aware that given the current odds, an academic career is probably not in my future.
Despite this, being at my current position for now over a year has allayed many of these anxieties and I am very much enjoying the stability. Given the chance to do this again, I don’t think I would. As in, I wish I would have prioritized stability much more.
The nature of academic work really benefits from having much longer stretches of time to focus on a particular problem. If you find yourself in that position where you can do this, it really is something special. The instability has also made life harder than it should for several personal reasons.
That said, being exposed to so many perspectives and intimidatingly smart colleagues has shaped much of my current outlook on music, theory, and the sciences.