drewmassey

Oral exams are terrifying but preparing for one will be an incredible learning experience and give you a ton of confidence later.

Source: those 90 minutes I was grilled by the entire Harvard music department faculty in 2006

This is true; my father was - and my husband's parents are - all professors so I know that small town academic life (for tenured faculty) is one flavor of the American Dream.

And pursuing your dreams is important. But I've also seen pretty talented people adjunct for decades at a stretch, because they believe that some day they will get a TT job - and I've also seen those same people seemingly only taking advice from their doctoral advisors, who (in my experience) consider anything besides a TT job as "failure".

If people want to live that way, they should. But the ideology of "pursue your dreams," when it comes to employment as a tenured professor at an American University - is often used to just string along adjunct labor in the home that someday their ship will come in.

As a former music history professor who now works in tech, I think the adjunctification of American universities is one of the the worst "best-kept secrets" out there. The sheer number of blog "exposés" of adjunct teaching that I have read over the last 20 years simply boggles the mind, each one breathlessly "revealing" the same secret. Of course, they are not wrong: I personally adjuncted for years and it does not pay (example: I earned $5,000 total the year after I graduated from Harvard with a PhD).

What really mystifies me, now that I have 8 years of perspective between me and the day I resigned from my tenure-track job, is why people who think of themselves as great thinkers (or, at least, good enough thinkers to teach college) cannot escape from something of a self-constructed prison of adjunct work. Based on my limited conversations with NTT academics who considered career changes during the pandemic, there is an odd quality of stockholm syndrome where PhDs (especially in the humanities) simply cannot fathom that any other life path might be worthwhile, and hence toil away.

I’ve heard it said that it only exists as a word so that there can also be “offboarding” when people are let go. I do not have a strong opinion about this.

Oh man I've seen Hart making the rounds. The obvious privilege of being a tenured Ivy League professor aside, a few things jump out

- Yes it would be nice if drugs were decriminalized ... but they aren't ... and the supply chain for heroin causes a lot of suffering in the world.

- Shrugging and leading with "only 30% of people have addictions" is astoundingly innumerate. If there were a 30% chance of a potentially fatal outcome in almost any other context it would be a big deal.

I earned a PhD in the humanities before going into tech. I loved it, and it was a tough slog to make the pivot. I know there is a lot of advice encouraging folks to “optimize their human capital” but I spent my 20s full time making my mind a great place to live in, and OP is an inspiration for doing the same at any age.

Why don’t you just ask them? Not in a confrontational way, but like “hey what are you up to this week?” I’ve worked in orgs from 10-30,000 people and have always been able to at least get 5-15 minutes with this level of management.

I don’t remember if it was chess or tennis or something else: “The good player is always lucky.”

With all this discussion of revival of old styles in this thread it is worth noting that France saw the revival of chant itself in the 19th century, which is in many ways an echo of that enchantment with the past. The musicologist Katherine Bergeron has a great book about it

I’ve handled one of the bay psalm books. It’s very magical even if the object itself is quite humble.

If you want to get laughed out of Houghton library ask the staff to page the Gutenberg for you, as one of my friends did in their first year of grad school

I was 34 when I switched from historical musicology to professional services. It can be done! All the advice in here is great. Software skews towards being merit and results driven (at least to getting hired)... the first step is way less difficult than a lot of other careers.

I actually used a large screen for a while but have enjoyed the focus that my Mac Book Air requires. Just sublime on full screen. Also, your setup is then uniform if you travel a lot for work (as I do) so there is no context switching overhead.

“Get to know your problem so well that fixing it by writing code is a last resort”

I love this stance.

I work at a startup that is using AI to reduce emissions in industrial and data center contexts. I like the big sky approach of this post but so much savings / reduction is an execution question.

We are hiring so DM me if you would like to learn more!

Ah perhaps I have stale information then. Last I heard retail truvada will run you north of $1,500 per month in the us.