How did college fail you?

I'm working on a pretty exciting project with fellow Brazen Careerist writer Milena Thomas and my task, right now, is to figure out exactly what college didn't teach me about a life in the performing arts.  Re-read Milena's great analysis of what she got in college... and exactly what I got out of my dance major... here. At Northwestern University, where I got my B.S., they even instituted a 'Senior Seminar' to hopefully remedy some of what the typical curriculum lacks... but it was much less about networking and finances, and much more about honing your craft for the end of the year performance.  I feel that a real senior seminar, a sort of 'Grown-up 101' should be mandatory, but thats another blog post entirely.

I need to come up with a list of questions to ask people who've gone through performing arts training and have figured out how to navigate the actual performing life. Or those who are still struggling with it.

I was lucky enough to be in the 'professional world' during high school and college so that I was pretty well prepared to handle the transition from craft to career... but in the grand scheme of things I spent about eight months as an actual professional dancer (six of those rehabbing a knee injury) so I obviously don't know it all.  I need to put myself in the shoes of some undergrad Junior who has an hour or two with a seasoned professional.  What would I ask?

 

School

• What do you feel was missing from your college education?
  
• Were you aware of what was missing while you were in school, or did it not hit you until later?
• What was most helpful about your college education?
• Were you able to use college to build relationships that helped you get jobs?

Personal Finance

• How did you figure out your personal finances? 
• Did you have any problems?
• If you teach/freelance, do you file as an independent contractor or have you incorporated yourself?
• Do you have a retirement fund?

Getting Performance/Art work

• Did networking come naturally to you, or did you have to work at it? Were you able to get additional gigs/jobs/etc. that you wouldn't have gotten through just an audition?
• Did you/do you do any personal marketing? Do you have a blog, Facebook profile, Myspace profile, Linkedin profile, etc. to increase visibility of your work?
• How has geography influenced your work load? Did you have to move to find more opportunities?

The All-Important Part-Time Job

• What jobs have you held to pay the bills while performing?
• What have been the best part-time jobs for you?
• What have been the worst?
• Do you think it is a good idea to work as a teacher in your field while performing?

Taking care of you

• How do you solve the health insurance issue?
• How do you stay organized?
• Do you ever feel like you need to distance yourself from your art?
• Have you ever felt like quitting? How did you cope with it?
• Have you ever been unable to perform? What happened, and how did you cope?
• If you have moved on from performing, how did you make the decision? Why did you make the decision? How did you move on? Are you still confident in your decision?

Have any of you out there graduated from college with a degree that helps you as little as a performing arts career? What would you have liked to know before you got out? Better yet, how would you improve the curriculum so that, when you get your diploma, you are ready to start working?

Go figure...

While drafting a letter to Google's head of HR, talking about the things wrong with their process, I get a phone call from them.  Apparently one of my two biggest issues with them is actually letting me back into the game.  Interview on campus (finally, no more video conferencing!) next week thanks to a cool kid named Jessie.

"I began to see that overplanning can be as pernicious as not planning at all.  There's an emotional lie to overplanning; it creates a security blanket that lets you assume you have things under control, that you are further along than you really are, that you're home free when you haven't even walked out the door yet."

-Twyla Tharp

Amen, sister.

Bad moods are just fine with me

I haven't blogged in two weeks.  Why, you ask?  Did I find a fantastic full-time job with benefits and challenges and a San Francisco-worthy salary?  Did I figure out how to put Christine Hassler's fantastic advice into practice and conquer my demons? Did I finally go back to Chicago and load up all of my belongings on a moving truck to make my relocation final? Have I been out making friends? Exercising? Am I dead?

Nope.

Basically, I've had nothing to say.  It's been a crappy couple of weeks full of mediocre interviews, disappointing work, and porn site data entry (yes, I somehow find myself doing data entry temp work for a porn site. Don't ask).  I'm feeling lonely and becoming acutely aware of the financial crunch in this new home of San Francisco.  Without anything positive, inspiring, or even interesting to write about, I figured I should just lay low until I can write the exciting 'How I got my dream job' or 'Why you should relocate right now' blog entry.  I hope you're not holding your breath, because I don't foresee these sorts of topics being discussed on Working + Wishing for at least a little while.

Yesterday I realized this: while society has hard-wired us to strive for and boast about our happiness and success, I think it is more than fine to be a Negative Nancy (or Negative Nick for you XY's out there) for an hour, a day, a couple of weeks if you want.  Sure, I've written about keeping your chin up before... but there's a big difference between living in pajamas, subsisting on Oreo's and what I'm talking about now, which is just being pretty damn disappointed with your own situation.

We talk about crises in our lives, we talk about trying to change them, and we talk about dealing with the change as these crises get rectified.  What seems to get forgotten is that after you've set the ball rolling to change things, there is this horrible middle ground where nothing seems to happen, and where you forget that something will eventually happen.  You've done all you can, and now you just sit and wait in your own mess.  A physical and psychological purgatory.   The place where I've been for a month in San Francisco, and a year in Chicago.

While this 'purgatory' sucks, I can't help but find that it serves a purpose.  When you wallow in your own self pity for a little bit, you find out a lot about yourself:

1. You learn your personal methods of keeping busy.  I, for one, take on projects to fill my time (though right now they are threatening to make me a full-time part-time-er).  An example on the opposite side of the spectrum is a friend who has become an expert Guitar Hero player because he doesn't feel he's ready for the working world yet.  I do not recommend his method, but I am sure there are even worse ways of keeping yourself occupied out there.

2. You learn what else in this world bothers you, other from the mess in your own personal sphere.  Several things (mostly crazy) have gotten me spitting mad in this time of limbo: the out of control use of plastic shopping bags in Chinatown, childhood obesity, complicated public transportation, how much a good bra costs... the list goes on.  What makes you mad without you even knowing it?  When you're already in a shitty mood, I guarantee you'll find out.

3. You will realize that, deep-down, you are a neat freak.  You will clean everything. You will organize everything.  You will have Excel spreadsheets that would make any tech nerd blush.

4. You will prioritize your time for your emotions.  Being upset is not allowed when your boyfriend just got home from work, but definitely okay while you're washing your hair or inputting the stage names for all the 'actors' in Midget Gangbang (once again, don't ask).

5. You will incorporate an even more finely developed sense of humor.  When everything gets bad, it somehow gets hilarious.  Case in point: instead of making me cry for Chicago, San Francisco's fireworks display on July 4th (nothing more than faint flashes of color lighting up a thick fog) made me laugh.  A full, belly aching, pee-in-my-pants laughing attack at something that would've opened the waterworks mere weeks ago.

6. You will write a stupid blog post like this that will make you realize that you're suddenly not in as morose a mood as you were half an hour ago.  Things aren't so bad... or maybe it's that it's okay that things are so bad.  

Just getting back from a whirlwind weekend of friends and wineries.  The contract job starts today, and I've got a 2 hour interview with a travel startup, but hopefully tonight or tomorrow some sort of blogging will commence.  There's a lot going on in this crazy brain right now!

Don't deny who you are. Just find a way to make it work.

The most interesting opportunities come from the most random of places.  I just got home from an incredibly exciting interview/meeting with a woman who has figured out the dance holy grail: making your knowledge of the needs and wants of professional dance companies lucrative.  I'm not going to spill the beans on what she's doing, but let's just say that she gets to keep dancing, choreographing, making connections, and she will get to travel the world doing it.  We'll call her P.

P was looking for a virtual assistant to help with the planning necessary for launching the company's website and its first round of fundraising.  She hopped on Craigslist's resume postings, searched the keyword 'dance', and up popped my resume.  We communicated via email for a bit, then had a great (albeit a bit giggly) phone conversation, and yesterday I met up with her and the president of her board in north Oakland for a face-to-face interview.  The interview quickly turned into a business planning meeting and, suffice it to say, I am incredibly excited.

When I stopped dancing professionally, I first assumed that I was just going to pop into the administrative office at some ballet company and make a new career for myself.  Months later, after leaving a dance performance during intermission for the umpteenth time because I was crying too much, I felt as though it was impossible for me to ever work in the field again.  Watching these companies that were doing work I could no longer do made me feel like a giant (giant meaning both major and obese) failure.  I stopped watching for openings at places like the Joffrey Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and San Francisco Ballet, and went the opposite direction: Silicon Valley tech companies.

If you've been reading my blog, you know how the new goal went.  Not very well.  Not that I failed completely, as the recruitment process is still in motion, but I'm not very optimistic anymore.

What excited me about talking with P yesterday is that she's approaching a new dance venture in the right way: with an entrepreneurial spirit, and with business sense.  My expertise comes in because I've worked with a huge range of dance organizations, including large foundations, schools, established companies imploding on themselves, small companies doing the right thing to become established, and small companies that never should have become anything in the first place.  I know what works, and what doesn't.  Since I consider myself to be rather equal parts 'artist' and 'business mind', I can see both sides of these dance organizations and why they are failing or doing well.  And P was smart enough to be able to see this from my resume.

Perhaps the smartest thing that P is doing is actively playing off of her strengths and weaknesses, and acquiring more people as a result of them.   She has grabbed someone good at all of the legal red tape and the 'corporate speak', someone with great connections for fundraising, people with international connections, people with the necessary language skills, etc.  I've been grabbed for my experience in dance PR, the building of a dance company 'brand', and my almost sickening love for figuring out the logistics of things like events and travel.  I'm not being counted on for operating any of my weaknesses, the most crippling of which being the fact that I'm still mourning the loss of my dance career.

This is a huge opportunity for me, because I'm getting in on the ground level of a venture that I think could actually work.  I'm getting to do what I want and what I'm good at.  I get to work from home, making my own hours, which still allows me to pursue other career interests and eventually my MBA.  The BEST part is that I am removed enough from the actual dancing; this unique situation is going to allow me to get bitten by the entrepreneurial bug while keeping me involved in dance in a way that I can handle it.

What feels so fulfilling right now is that I know that, for a few hours every week, I won't need to deny a huge part of 'me' anymore.

BPTW Update

Dear me, this has officially gotten ridiculous.  Despite stellar reviews on my 8 interviews, both teams have decided to pursue other candidates.  And it gets better: my recruitment has out-lasted my recruiter.  Today was her last day, so she called to let me know that she has passed my file on to one of her associates, who will let me know if any other openings pop up.

We're heading onto five months now.  I'm definitely not holding my breath anymore, if the 17-ish job applications I've sent out since moving are any indication.  Also, I've started looking at continuing education programs and masters programs in the area as I'd definitely consider a part-time working-and-school arrangement. We'll see what happens.

At least it is frickin' perfect in San Francisco today (but isn't it everyday?)...