Ben,
The music / computer overlap is a lot more widespread than just
Bloomington. I worked in the SF Bay area, and a lot of the brightest
people I worked with were also musicians of one sort of another.
Personally, I'm not a musician, but my father (who is also in the
industry) is known to DJ.
Here's some things that I, personally, think you should consider:
* How much free time do you want to have? Having been a student for so
long, this is likely to be something you could easily forget to think
about. To have free time you can either be freelance, or you could have
a lot of vacation time. It can be a lot easier to make the money go
around if you simply have a lot of vacation time. (Outside of working at
a university it is hard to get much vacation time.)
* Know the perils of freelance work. Until someone gets comfortable with
freelance work, many people find they spend almost all of their free
time trying to find another freelance job. Then there's the issue of the
lack of health care. This isn't much of an issue while you're young and
healthy, but then you'd be surprised how many issues you can develop
when nobody checks on your health. (My father's been a consultant off
and on his entire career. I say this with enough second-hand experience
to have always wanted to stay away from it.)
* If you like the Bloomington area, consider taking a job at the
University. They don't pay a lot, but they are regularly hiring, and
they're always happy for you to learn more. You can spend another four
to eight years trying to get your education just right to enter the
field, or you could try getting your feet wet as soon as possible and
go from there. They have part-time jobs that come up regularly. Even if
you're totally unqualified for one of their full-time jobs right now,
a lot of people in UITS started out part-time. Part-time positions can
generally suck (anywhere you go), but full-time UITS positions at IU
have some nice benefits.
* Weigh the job opportunities by their networking possibilities as well
as the monetary rewards. When you're entering the industry, you need
to meet other people. You need to meet people who may be hiring in the
future, and perhaps most importantly, you need to meet people who do
interesting work where you have the opportunity to talk with them and
think to yourself, "You know, I want to do what s/he does."
* Look for jobs with growth opportunities. When you're starting out, you
want to have the opportunities to grow your skills. This means a number
of things:
+ getting a job where you know you'll need to learn some new things.
You'll know you'll need to pick some things up fairly quickly, but
what you need to know should be within reason.
+ getting a job where they encourage you to learn new things on your
own. This could be as simple as a place letting you read books on
your own during down-time.
+ avoiding jobs where they work you to the bone leaving no time to
learn. This includes passing by short-term big money in favor of
growing your skills.
+ looking for jobs where they will pay for your continued education.
Do they pay for a college class? Will they send you to conferences?
* Leverage your support network. You're looking to break in to a new
field. You'll need to spend some time studying new material. If you
think you might do some part-time work, then you will likely not be able
to support yourself living on your own. As such, you should try to avoid
it.
* Take inventory of your current skills. A lot of music people don't
really touch computers at all. However, there are others that manage to
do quite a bit with them -- even though their primary focus was on the
music at the time. Have you had any computer-related issues that you
solved on your own? Have you installed your own hardware or software? Do
you know any computer languages already? Which operating systems have
you used, and of those, which are you comfortable with? Make sure you
take note of your "soft" skills, too. (You may have exceptional people
skills. You probably are comfortable in front of a group of people,
etc.)
* Keep an eye on the job postings. You should also know that even if you
don't see yourself as a perfect fit for a job, you may be the best that
they've seen. Look for jobs where you wouldn't mind learning what you
don't already know. Also, if you see a lot of jobs looking for something
in particular, you may want to buy a book on it and read up about it.
* Are you willing to start off in a support position? Support jobs are
something of a classic starting point for people trying to break in to
the industry. They depend primarily on the ability to communicate well
with people. They also have a high tendency to burn people out. This
means two things:
1. They're almost always hiring. Local ISPs are the prime example
of places which typically need this sort of position filled. While
those have been disappearing, almost any tech-related business may
have a need of phone support.
2. The position needs to be seen as a transitory one. Leverage the
position for what you can learn, and stay with it until you've
mastered it. Plan your exit strategy when you're hired. Read up on
other computer-related material during your off time.
* Attend computer-related conferences when you can. These not only give
you a great opportunity to learn new skills and meet interesting people
also interested in the field, they have been known to help people find
great new jobs. (I met someone who got his job with Canonical as a
direct result of talking to people at a conference. I met him at the
conference prior to him getting the job, and when I ran in to him a
couple months later at another conference he had a fantastic new job.)
The closest, cheapest conference around this area is probably the Ohio
LinuxFest <http://www.ohiolinux.org/>. I know a number of people from
Bloomington attended last year.
* Having a degree is more important than having a degree in your field.
Don't think that your degree is worthless, just because you aren't going
to be using it when you go in to computers. I've worked with a lot of
people with degrees in unrelated fields. (Including PhDs in physics,
and PhDs in medieval literature.) It matters more that you know what
they want. You've already proven that you can learn what will be needed.
(Last I heard, I think the numbers are that on average people change
entire industries every seven years right now. There are a lot of people
not using their degrees.)
I think that's about it. Personally, I think my opinions are highly
biased (though generally sensible), so your mileage may vary.
Cheers,
Steven Black
On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 09:00:11PM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
>
> Ben,
>
> As someone who was a music ed major as well for my first two years of
> college, I can say that you're in good company. Probably a quarter of
> people involved in the computer industry are musicians. I think you
> should think about leveraging your music degrees to get into the
> computer industry instead of how to just approach a computer job like
> being a programmer or an administrator.
>
> The first thing that comes to mind is games. There are many games
> that have a large budget for custom music, often recorded using
> electronic instruments.
>
> There are also probably people who act as technology testers or
> consultants for music software creators like Reason, Garage Band,
> Cubase, etc. Even electronic music equipment manufacturers need these
> people for software that they write.
>
> So how do you get these jobs? Perhaps just meet some people who are
> already in them at conferences, through forums or whatever. I think the
> computer music/audio industry has grown a lot in the past 10 years. For
> the first few decades of computing, audio took a back seat to graphics,
> but now its finally caught up and there are careers in that kind of
> stuff. There is also the whole emerging industry of streaming music and
> cataloging it. These are just a few ideas, just look around your own
> house and think of how all the electronics are created and realize that
> there are many people behind the creation of each one of those items.
> Including musicians.
>
> I think Joe Auty and some of the other musicians on the list will have
> something to say too.
>
> Mark
>
> On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 08:03:15PM GMT, Ben Shewmaker [benshewmaker@yahoo.com] said the following:
> > Hey all,
> >
> > I was hoping to get a little bit of advice from people on this mailing list. After getting an undergraduate degree in music education and starting a masters in saxophone performance at IU, I quit after a semester because I wasn't enjoying it anymore. I was looking at other options and thought I'd like to try electronic music and so started a masters in electronic music from the University of Miami. But, after a semester there, I find myself back in Bloomington again searching for a career that excites me and also has a better chance of gainful employment than finding a position to teach electronic music at the university level (which is what I thought I would do with my masters in electronic music. turns out I wasn't that into the program and there are very few positions for what I was training myself for. maybe 5 to 10 positions in the country every year according to a proff at IU).
> >
> > Anyways, I am again reconsidering my options and was at least glimpsing in the direction of some sort of career involved in computers or networking. I know saying I want a job here is like saying I want a job doing music; music is too broad a categorization as there are many specific areas of study within music. I was just hoping if anyone could at least point me in the right direction to find out what types of positions are out there, how hard they are to get, how rewarding they are, etc. And also, what type of education is required to enter this field and are there any really good schools nearby for computer science type degrees. I know IU has a great music school but I know nothing about their other departments.
> >
> > Any help anyone could give me would be really appreciated!
> >
> > Ben Shewmaker
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