Posted by Rick Denney on February 09, 2004 at 11:08:40:
In Reply to: Re: Re: serious career question posted by One thing... on February 08, 2004 at 23:31:53:
Since I know a guy who is working his way through the pro-baseball farm clubs right now, I can speak a little to that analogy. He was drafted by the Colorado Rockies out of college three years ago.
I suspect it is easier to get a job in baseball than playing the tuba. And probably it is easier to make it all the way to the major leagues than to get a tuba position in a full-time orchestra that pays a living wage. I'm defining "easier" to mean that while one is pursuing that goal, they are positively directed and being paid to learn (though not being paid much). When their potential for making it all the way has been shown to be lacking, then they will know it clearly and can make their next choices with that knowledge in hand.
Baseball scouts start looking at talent in high school (and the school-boy leagues) and early in college. By the time a baseball player is a junior in college, they already know whether they have a shot at getting drafted by a team. If they are good enough not to need college, they know by the time they are 18 whether there is any chance for them at all.
If drafted by a team, then they spend a season in the rookie league. They get paid nearly nothing and worked nearly to death. They either love it and take the field gleefully, or they fall apart. If they survive that, they get moved to a low-level single-A farm club. When they impress their bosses enough, they get moved to a regular single-A club. That's the first real test. If they excel there, they get moved up to double-A and then triple-A. At any time they may be called into the major-league team--or not. Until they are, they are barely paid a living wage.
This process holds for the prodigy who signs a million-dollar deal as much as for the guy who comes in from college (the college grads are paid very little, because they are older and more desperate).
It is similar to music in two senses: 1.) there is no hiding lack of skill. If you don't have the ability, it will be all too apparent. 2.) Advancement decisions often seem arbitrary, because the major-league teams don't always tell the players what they hope to achieve with that player. But it's also profoundly different: Music has few farm clubs and none that pay. There are only a handful of training orchestras in the country, only one or two orchestras sponsor training orchestras specifically designed to bring people into their organization. Why? Because while major league baseball is profitable enough to support training clubs, orchestral music is not.
On the other hand, a musician with really good business skills and a workaholic streak can find ways to make it on their own if they are versatile enough and willing to put big miles on their car. Baseball players have no paying prospects outside a team, unless they want to teach.
Several of us have made the argument that undergraduate education should be about creating educated people, not about creating efficient employees. But advanced degrees really should lead to a job or career, it seems to me. A master's degree is specifically job training, while a doctorate is a more general degree designed to allow the graduate to advance the state of the art. So, if you work on a DMA, consider that your primary objective will be to discover something not previously known, and then write about it rigorously enough to bring it into the body of what is known. That's what academics do for a living, in addition to teaching. If that excites you, then you are a real candidate for a DMA program and a job in academia. If it doesn't, the I'd suggest some hard thinking. I did this thinking myself, and decided that being a practitioner of my field was what I wanted to do more than teaching and researching about it, and thus I did not pursue the Ph.D. program.
There are lots of fields where jobs are scarce, even with advanced degrees. Astronomers, for example, generally have to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics or some related field, which is academically quite rigorous. And then few find positions that pay a living wage. Many careers that grow from passionate hobbies are the same way, because there are always people willing to do the entry-level jobs for free or very little. This is why people say that getting a gig playing tuba is as hard as fill-in-the-blank glamorous profession. After college, there is no support while the search is underway.
Rick "who expected to be paid during job training" Denney