Elijah Sales
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Illya Hicks, Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Rice University, Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

As talent and competition in various fields only seem to grow, it becomes easy for us to overlook the importance of persistence. The path that Dr. Illya Hicks took to professorship at Rice University seems nothing short of challenging and eventful, yet his dedication to answering some of the most pressing questions in his field makes it ultimately rewarding. I had the honor of hearing a discussion from several years ago between Dr. Hicks and Nathan Andrus, former Rice University student. During this conversation, Dr. Hicks reveals factors that influenced him to delve into research and professorship in computational and applied mathematics, as well as insights into overcoming obstacles to attain leadership and achieve success.

Dr. Hicks is a professor of computational and applied mathematics at Rice University, where he also performs research in this field. He graduated from Texas State University with a BS in Mathematics and subsequently pursued his graduate studies at Rice, where he obtained an MA and PhD in computational and applied mathematics. During his undergraduate years, Dr. Hicks took a class called “Deterministic Operations Research,” which influenced him to further explore computational and applied mathematics in greater depth. In fact, Dr. Hicks’s research interests span across various areas of the field, including combinatorial optimization, integer programming, matroid theory, and graph theory.

An interesting point that Dr. Hicks mentions regarding research, in general, is the intense competition involved, both with others and with himself. Not only is he motivated by the urge to prove or find something significant before anyone else, he is also driven by the need to exceed others’ expectations, as well as those of his own. Dr. Hicks reveals that as a child, he despised being “beaten” by a problem and not being able to solve that problem. As a graduate student at Rice, he felt that he “had to prove [himself],” and with this mindset, was able to succeed well beyond graduate school. One particular instance of success occurred when, after someone deemed a proof he submitted as incomplete, he was able to prove a conjecture on that proof from a different perspective. By breaking down these personal and external barriers, Dr. Hicks succeeded in proving mathematical concepts, and through the process prove himself, to others.

As someone who enjoys planning years into the future, I found that another crucial takeaway from this conversation is accepting the unpredictability of career paths. Dr. Hicks reveals that while he intended to pursue a career in industry with his PhD, meeting and working with Dr. Richard Tapia, also a professor of computational and applied mathematics at Rice, eventually influenced him to become a professor himself. He mentions a summer program that Dr. Tapia held in which students would not only conduct research but would also discuss professional and personal development. Through this program, Dr. Hicks became enticed with such development and now conducts a similar program for his own graduate students.

Dr. Hicks also emphasizes the significance of going the extra mile to achieve success and gain leadership in research. Although he believes that success is generally abstract, he attributes it to two characteristics: perseverance and creativity; without one or the other, it would be difficult for researchers to contribute original and meaningful ideas to any particular field. I found this insight to be an interesting connection to Dr. Hicks’s anecdote about proving a conjecture; because of his open-mindedness and persistence, he is able to contribute significantly through research. In terms of leadership, Dr. Hicks sees himself as a leader in discrete optimization at Rice and in the decomposition of broader problems from his research into smaller, more intricate parts. Aside from being a professor of computational and applied mathematics, he was also the Faculty Advisor to the President for the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice. He has also served as President of the Minority Issues Forum of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) at the time of this conversation, a role that has allowed him to help minorities succeed in their graduate studies and research.

The advice that Dr. Hicks provides about achieving greatness is extremely relevant to the ever-changing avenue of research. With the advent of innovative technologies and the surplus of impactful ideas, it becomes increasingly important to take a step back and truly “think outside the box.” Many ambitious students and researchers today dream about changing the world in some way, yet are hindered by the “fear of the unknown,” which Dr. Hicks believes is what prevents ideas from becoming reality and dreamers from becoming leaders. Getting rid of that fear is the first step to achieving greatness and making an impact. Employing perseverance and creativity is the next.

Sarah Sowell
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Songying Fang, Associate Professor, Rice University, Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

Several years ago, as a part of the Gateway Study of Leadership program at Rice University, students were asked to interview professors in the social science school. Nadia Khalid chose to interview Songying Fang, an associate professor of political science. Dr. Fang earned her PhD at the University of Rochester in 2006 and has worked at Rice University since 2009. Her academic research centers on state behavior in international institutions and interstate conflict, using game theory and empirical research to explain their interactions. Her unique background and dedicated focus are evident throughout this insightful interview. 

Growing up in China, Dr. Fang attended both undergraduate and some graduate school there, majoring in economics. She recounts that her time in the Chinese higher education system was different from the American school experience, emphasizing students tend to listen in China and to talk in America. She explains in her own experience at an American university, she initially“adopted the approach to listen first about what others have to say and just trying to figure out what’s going on.” She says that this experience of gradually adapting to a different learning environment has given her a chance to connect better to international students, encouraging them to speak up, something she is in a unique position to do.

Because Rice University has relatively smaller classes, Dr. Fang encourages discussions and exchanges, especially during seminar courses. This is because one of her goals for students in her class is for them to be proactive and leading discussions. As a professor, she looks for leaders in her classes, noticing not just the loudest voices but also a variety of traits that encompass a leader. In fact, she views it as an integral part of instructing, saying, “I encourage the students to be future leaders.” Still, she remains in charge of the class, both fostering discussion and modeling leadership herself, remarking “I want to strike a balance between being the leader but also giving significant freedom to students to express what they think.”

Other parts of Dr. Fang’s background also continue to influence her work. As a former economics major, she shifted her focus after realizing “that what I was most interested in is politics, but not just certain events; I wanted to understand why things happen the way they do,” and this dedication to deep understanding is evident in her discussion of her research. Instead of just focusing on issues and solutions, her work dives deep into the complex causes of political trends. One of the interview’s most interesting sections is a sidebar focusing on Dr. Fang’s research on non-democratic countries’ involvement in international organizations, even when there is no clear reason to do so. She politely challenges preconceived notions, showing a dedication to find the (possibly numerous) root causes of this phenomena.

Her final advice for students is simple: remember, you go to college to learn. She believes that while extracurricular involvements are deeply enriching, it’s imperative for students to put their education first. One thing she thinks “would be useful for a student to [understand] is that the four years that they have at Rice, or at any undergrad institution, is the best time for learning.” After all, as she points out to the interviewer, students will always have a chance to pursue their passion and projects, but college is the only time they have to entirely dedicate themselves to education. She notes that “most students will realize immediately after they graduate…they can’t get that [dedicated learning time] anymore. A lot of competing demands from their lives, from their job, they just won’t have the environment where they’re just allowed to study knowledge.” 

Highlights from the Interview by Nadia Khalid:

When you were growing up, did your parents expect that you would come to political science? Was that always your career path, or did it just come about?

In my case, my mother was a teacher, my dad was a researcher, though he was not at a university; he was at an academic unit studying philosophy.

Growing up, I was always interested in having a lifestyle similar to his. I think what impressed me was that I woke up in the evening and saw the light was still on in the room, and I find that the…I can’t quite describe it. I feel the intellectual life was something very appealing and the idea of thinking about something deeply…That’s meaningful, and that was always very attractive to me. I always somewhat wanted to be a researcher and, more specifically as I went through my graduate study, to be a professor, both teaching and research.

What was your trajectory?  Did you go straight to college right from high school?

I did my college and university in China, and then I started my graduate study there as well, and then I applied to schools. I studied economics before I came to the United States, and then I realized that what I was most interested in is politics, but not just certain events; I wanted to understand why things happen the way they do. I wanted to understand the reasons, and so I decided to transfer to the political science program in the University of Rochester, and I’ve been enjoying doing it.

Did you feel the transition from China to the American education system was very easy for you? What were the big differences?

Yeah, so I guess I can answer it in two parts. One is my own experience, the other is the teaching aspect of it. Yeah, I do think that there is more emphasis here for students participating in classes, and you need to speak up instead of being quiet and just listen. I think in my own experience, in the first two years—when I was in graduate school in the US—I tended to stay more or less quiet.

But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t ask questions when…I really want to understand, and I didn’t have problem to ask about it. But I adopted the approach to listen first about what others have to say and just trying to figure out what’s going on. Sometimes, you don’t necessarily know what’s going on, both because of the language issues and because of subject matter…

With the students that I’m teaching, I think we get pretty diverse student bodies, and because of my own experience, I think I do offer more understanding to, say, foreign students, Asian students, where they’re coming from in terms of cultural background. I try to encourage them to speak up more and also understand maybe they initially have some language issues that need to be taken into account when I lecture. 

I think that for leaning, both the ability to listen and the ability to express yourself are equally important. Sometimes students feel that they don’t know enough, they can’t contribute, so they tend to just be quiet all the time. I think what’s important to remember is that maybe the questions you have, others do have the same questions. And the other thing is it’s such an efficient way to just ask instead of trying to figure out [by yourself]. You know, if you go back, and you do a search for answers, and it takes much more time. Why don’t you just raise it to the professor or fellow students? So, that part of it is somewhat easier to address, I think, once you realize that—okay, you adapt to the culture, you adapt to the environment, people do tend to speak up more. 

The other part, often overlooked, is the ability to listen to others. In my seminar, for example, I have a structure that I use to run the class…I think it helps for students to learn from each other.  One drawback would be that they would be speaking at the same level, they share information, or they share thoughts, but then you need new information to be injected into the discussion. I think of that as an instructor’s role. So I tend to run my seminar putting in some structure, so that when I feel students are maybe running a circle, then I’ll cut it off—I break the discussion and provide information or provide my comments. At the same time, you do want to understand where students are. But I think that applies to students, too. I think it’s important to listen to what others are thinking instead of focusing too much on expressing your own opinion and just go on and on, without realizing that maybe others have a different view.

Could you talk a little about your research? I saw in some of your articles, you talk about non-democracies and the problem with economic reform, and you talked about how they should look to international institutions.

I think my research interests, first of all, focus on international institutions. I study how institutions can change countries’ behavior, and you have to put this into context of what we know about international system. And there’s, I think, a lot of scholars who agree that international system at the very basic level is anarchic, meaning that there’s no world government that can regulate state behavior. So it seems that, at least in principle, states can do whatever they want…But in reality, that is not what we observe.For example, right now, it’s very interesting that Palestinians are interested in taking their statehood to the United Nations. It’s just that there’s something about international institutions that are important. They represent some kind of legitimacy. So, the question is, given that the world seems to be anarchic, why is it that countries pay attention to what an institution says?

[The UN has] no credible enforcement power. Its enforcement power can really only come from member states willing to contribute to whatever the UN calls for, but countries don’t have to.  So, the question is, given that institutions are largely toothless, why states would still pay attention to what they say. So that has always fascinated me.

All of my work, more or less, sort of focuses on answering that question by providing so-called causal mechanisms. Really, causal mechanism, basically, is an explanation about why. Why do we observe this type of behavior from states? In different projects, I try to explain what could be that causal mechanism for institutions to be effective. One of the papers will be talking about how domestic politics is the causal mechanism, and leaders feel that they have to appear in front of domestic audiences at least that they are unbiased in their policy choice. And institutions can provide legitimacy to their policy or confirm that what the leader chooses to do is the right policy.  Domestic politics, in my opinion, is one reason that states care about what institutions say. That causal mechanism may apply to democracies in particular because leaders are subject to electoral pressure. 

For non-democracies, as you mentioned, causal mechanisms might be different. Now, empirically, we do observe non-democracies care about institutions as well. For example, China was interested in joining the WTO [World Trade Organization]. China is a permanent member of the [UN] Security Council, so non-democracies care about institutions. The question is, why? Why, what is causal mechanism? If there is no election, what is the alternative mechanism that makes states or governments that are non-democratic still pay attention to it? So that is the big question, and I am still sort of in the process of trying to figure that out, and I’m doing pieces of projects as I make progress on answering that question.

How do you remain a leader in the classroom and how do you cultivate leadership in the classroom?

I’ll talk about it as an instructor and then how I encourage the students to be future leaders.

I think as an instructor it is important that you have an agenda to come across or you have a goal for the semester, what you want students to take away. That is something that I need to make sure to be implemented in the teaching so that, even in the seminar, I don’t just let the students talk throughout the class. You have to inject what things you want them to take away, and that’s part of it. I’m trying to strike a balance between providing a structure and also allowing students to have their input. That is both interesting among themselves, also interesting to me, because you have to know what students think to know what will be the best way to convey information. So that’s from my teaching philosophy. I want to strike a balance between [being] the leader but also giving significant freedom to students to express what they think. 

The part of trying to encourage the student to become leaders—I think the most important part of it is to give them tools rather than information. To me, it’s less important to tell them what’s happening, so the events—which I think students can find out themselves by reading newspapers. If anything, these days there’s too much information. I think what could potentially be lacking is analysis of information. Information [alone doesn’t] tell you anything until you know how to sort it out. I think that’s what I try to do, to teach student tools to analyze information. I don’t tell them what the conclusion should be, but I hope to give them the tools so that they come to conclusions themselves. It’s much more important, I think, to teach a student about how to approach a problem and draw their conclusions.

Can you talk about the biggest challenge you think students face right now in terms of their undergraduate educational experience? Is there something that you notice overall that’s different from your time as an undergraduate that you see as the big obstacle to the undergraduate experience?

I wouldn’t put it as obstacle, but one thing that I think would be useful for a student to [understand] is that the four years that they have at Rice, or at any undergrad institution, is the best time for learning. That is the priority.

Sometimes I think students can forget this, especially as they progress into senior years, when they start to have a lot of other engagements. They’re all useful experiences to be leaders of some kind of student organization and engage in charity work. It’s all great!  But I think one should not forget that this is the time where they can actually sit down and, in a very protected environment, where everybody’s trying to help them with learning. And one thing most students will realize immediately after they graduate is that they can’t get that anymore. A lot of competing demands from their lives, from their job, they just won’t have the environment where they’re just allowed to study knowledge. When you graduate, you’re only twenty-two, there’s a whole life ahead of you if you want to do extra stuff that’s interesting. Don’t forget you’re a student first.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Alishahal Macknojia
University of Houston
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Sanjula Jain, Executive Director of Research and Advisory, The Health Management Academy, Washington, D.C. (38.9° N, 77.0° W)

Dr. Sanjula Jain is the executive director of research and advisory at The Health Management Academy (The Academy) based in Washington, DC. Prior to cultivating a fixed interest in any one field, Dr. Jain was a pre-med student at Rice University, where she earned her degree in psychology and ecology and evolutionary biology. After graduation, she immersed herself in The Academy, first as a part of a health services fellowship and then in a governance position. After teaching and working at Emory Healthcare while concurrently earning a PhD in health services research and health policy at Emory University, she returned to The Academy to lead the organization’s research arm. She discussed her journey with Longitude.site contributor Anu Dwarumpudi, a biochemistry and molecular biology graduate from Rice University.

While her path may seem planned to onlookers, Dr. Jain didn’t always envision herself in the field of healthcare management. Though she comes from a family with an entrepreneurial background, she saw herself working in the high impact field of healthcare due to her love for the sciences. She originally envisioned herself as a physician, but she began to diversify her interests in college. During her last semester of her senior year, she conducted 30 to 40 informational interviews with various roles ranging from physicians to administrators to clinical researchers, as well as with professors and colleagues. One of those interviews led her to speak with the cofounder and CEO of The Academy. Through this conversation Dr. Jain was introduced to the field of health services—the organization, financing, and delivery of healthcare—which eventually led to her initial role at The Academy where she supported peer-learning programs for the CEOs and boards of trustees of large health systems and various research projects. On the recommendation of mentors, she then decided to research PhD programs, and she conducted informational interviews again. Her efforts and doctoral degree resulted in the work she does today as the head of research and advisory services at The Academy, where she is responsible for the thought leadership of research efforts to help guide the strategies of the nation’s largest health systems and most innovative healthcare companies.

According to Dr. Jain, she would not have been who she is today without the guidance of the many mentors she encountered, all with unique backgrounds. The relationships she has built with them were organically formed; she did not have to be upfront in actively seeking them or asking

if they would mentor her. These mentors instilled in her a unique sense of curiosity, as she puts it, and posed questions that encouraged her to think in a way she had not before. A recurring theme in Dr. Jain’s career is best characterized by “having conversations with people and really trying to understand their experiences and what you can learn from their path.” Dr. Jain has moved forward with her career by building relationships. What I took away from her interview was that when you are open to sharing your thoughts with anyone and willing to accept theirs, your relationship can naturally arrange itself into a mentorship.

Highlights from the interview:

How did family, community, and life circumstances create a general expectation or a role for you? What was expected of you growing up, and did you adhere to it or stray from that?

I was raised with two guiding principles. One is whatever you do, do something that you’re passionate about and something that you can always give your full self to. And the second was, do something that makes a difference or has an impact on the community, however you define that to be.

My parents never told me, “Be this, or do this.” It was always “Explore your passions. Figure out what it is, and go do something from there.” That’s pretty much all that was expected of me. Because of those expectations, I’ve only ever done things that I’ve been passionate about. I’ve never done something just for the sake of doing things.

Did you always envision yourself doing what you do at The Health Management Academy?

Not at all. I started off studying pre-med. My family is very entrepreneurial, both my parents have started several small businesses and accounting firms. In my mind I said, “I don’t really want to do business, but I love science, and healthcare has great impact,” so when I narrowed it down by process of elimination, I envisioned myself as a physician. I didn’t know why; I didn’t really know anything else beyond that. And then as I kept going, all my activities stopped aligning to it. I started diversifying my interests. There came a point at which I said, “I don’t think that being a physician actually is what I’m passionate about and doesn’t cater to those diverse interests.” Then at that point, I didn’t actually know what that meant, or what I wanted to be, and I started talking to different people to learn alternate paths.

That’s also indicative of what my pre-med journey has been, because I’ve been interested in various things from policy to law to medicine. Finding an intersection between all of those has been a struggle. So hearing you talk about that, I definitely relate to that. Did you have someone who acted as a mentor who helped cultivate your variety of interests?

I would not be who I am without the amazing mentors in my life. If I looked back as far as high school, I’ve had many mentors—with entirely unique backgrounds—along the way. I never actively sought them out asking “Will you mentor me?” It was always organic. It was always someone I looked up to for having a unique job and/or someone I could bounce ideas with. Every mentor of mine instilled in me a different sense of curiosity and posed questions to me that pushed me think in a different way, and if I were to reflect on that, I’d say that each of those people helped me put those pieces together. For that I will be eternally grateful.

What led to your current position, and what does that position entail?

At the end of my senior year, I was still thinking pre-med. I decided that I wanted to do the infamous gap year, because I still didn’t quite know what I wanted to do. I kept asking people at Rice about other paths, such as policy or business, but I didn’t get a lot of great answers. I spent my last semester of senior year probably doing 30 to 40 informational interviews with different people at the Texas Medical Center, professors, and different people who connected me to those people. By happenstance, actually through a Rice connection, I did an informational interview with someone in DC who worked at The Health Management Academy (The Academy), where I work now. He was explaining what he did, and I didn’t understand any of it. He was using all this terminology that I truly knew nothing about, but it sounded interesting. He asked me about my interests, and one thing led to another, and I was connected to the CEO of the company. I was intrigued by the CEO’s background. He was a PhD in chronic disease epidemiology and an MBA in finance but was running this healthcare company. I was just going into this conversation trying to learn, “Oh, what do other people do in healthcare?” And one thing led to another and the next thing I knew I was flying up to DC.

Next thing you know, I’m going through a whole day of 16 interviews, and I didn’t know what I was interviewing for. In the end, The Academy CEO offered me a Health Services Fellowship. The fellowship was a hybrid Chief of Staff role with a research component. I travelled with the CEO. I did all these meetings with him from a business point of view—how he ran the business, how he managed [the] executive team, how he interfaced with clients who were these really influential senior leaders. And that’s also where I was introduced the concept of health services.

Health services, in [the] way that I was taught, is anything that relates to the organization, financing, and delivery of healthcare. For context, let me tell you what The Health Management Academy is, and I’ll go back to my current role. We’re a 20-year-old company, and the purpose of the company is to provide executive peer learning and leadership development for the senior leaders and C-suite executives of large health systems and innovative companies.

As part of my fellowship, I traveled to what we call executive forums such as the Chief Medical Officer forum, and I would hear what they were working on in regard to physician alignment and compliance issues. I would also meet with Trustees and understand how health systems CEOs work with their Boards to make governance decisions. I always said I had the best job in the world because I was getting paid to learn and rotate through all these different people and basically be in a room with the most powerful people in healthcare, to observe and absorb what they have to do, what they’re responsible for, [while they were] making these really big decisions—sometimes decisions I knew about before they were publicly known. That’s what I did my first year: I learned a ton. That’s where the whole world of healthcare opened up to me, and from there I took on some other roles. I was then promoted to direct the educational programs for Governance—which includes CEOs and Boards of Trustees.

I was still debating medical school, but I also started questioning what other graduate paths I could consider. A lot of my mentors at the time told me, “You should look at an MBA and go the business route.” “Why [do] I want to go to graduate school?” was a question I had never quite asked myself. When I would be in these meetings with CEOs, I would always be thinking, “How did they come up with that decision? How did they know that was going to work or not work? How did they come to that conclusion?“ I didn’t feel like, even if I had 20 years of experience, that I would be able to contribute to that conversation and make a recommendation to a leader without having something to back it up with. So one of my mentors asked, “Have you thought about getting your PhD?”

I started researching programs and talking to program directors for another round of informational interviews. This was a big theme of my life: having conversations with people and really trying to understand their experiences and what you can learn from their path. That’s where I started looking at health services research… it’s not public policy, it’s not business, it’s kind of a gray area in between. I ended up getting connected to the Health Policy and Management department chair at Emory [University], which is where I eventually got my PhD. It was inspiring talking to this nationally-renowned professor who had this formal academic training but was applying his training in a real-world setting. He wasn’t just publishing papers, he was advising organizations on how to design their healthcare systems, both domestically and internationally. Emory fosters an applied learning experience which was, “We will teach you the principles of health economics and health services research, and how to be a good researcher, and the basics of health policy, and give you the foundation, but then it’s up to you to figure out how to apply that training and that evidence-based perspective…to drive policy or influence broader systemic change.”

After graduating from Emory, I had no plans to go back to The Academy. I was exploring other options when I got a call from the CEO of The Academy asking, “Would you come back and consider building a formal research business for us?” And that’s what I do now.

Now I serve as The Academy’s Head of Research and Advisory Services. What that really means is I manage a $5M business function and lead a team of eight individuals to produce strategic research and thought leadership catered to the C-suite and senior executives of large health systems and healthcare companies. In short, we leverage data, and our broader expertise in health services, to guide leader around current and anticipated trends – as it relates to the organization, financing and delivery of healthcare—and their implications moving forward.

I find your first position at the company to be really interesting because you’re able to put on a lot of different hats, and I think that is something that’s really unique and something that’s very valuable to have. What skills do you think were most useful for your position in general at that time?

I never really asked, “Tell me what to do.” I was someone who was going to observe and then figure out how can I initiate value and insert myself in a way that would be helpful before someone would ask. I think there was [a component of] always being super proactive and learning your environment. It was about findings ways to become so invaluable and taking it upon yourself to get things done without being told. I never waited for anyone to give me my tasks. I was always thinking ahead and asking questions when I needed clarity.

How do you think getting your PhD has shaped your career and also your current role right now?

I pursued a PhD for many reasons, but primarily wanted to develop a new technical skillset. Yes, now I can build economic models and answer complex health services research questions. But more than anything, it gave me a new conceptual framework for how to think about and approach problems. I feel like it opened my eyes into how to think analytically in a way that I had never been exposed to before. I could not do my job without it. Everyday I leverage this way of thinking in my approach in working with healthcare executives and arming them with key insights to help them make informed strategic decisions.

Can you describe the dynamics of a team that works on a project in terms of structure, organization, and other characteristics that you think are important?

The culture and structure, by design, should be highly collaborative. I like to foster a team environment in which it’s almost impossible to do your job without another person. Everyone has this objective around how do we solve the problem in the most creative, innovative ways. Personally, I treat it not as we’re doing a task but as we’re trying to solve a problem. And frame everything we do in that lens.

How have science and technology shaped the work that you do currently?

Technological advances and scientific discoveries continue to accelerate. It requires me to keep up with these new trends and the implications that might have for a health system. Whether that’s something that Apple puts out to allow you take your own ECG on your wrist or consumer being able to walk around with their genetic profile data. All those things have huge implications on how healthcare is delivered and therefore how we pay for it. And all those factors make healthcare unbelievably complex, but also makes me optimistic about a future where we can deliver a new, higher standard of healthcare.

What changes do you foresee in your specific area in health services?

I see that over time, the payment mechanisms for health care services are going to change so that it’s easier for patients and consumers to access care. I think that the new era of medicine and how healthcare is delivered is going to be highly digital and “asset-light”. Receiving most of your care in a physical hospital or physician’s office going to be a way of the past. More of your care will be delivered virtually and in ways we have yet to imagine. Every single player in the healthcare industry is going to be disrupted—how physicians are trained, how Washington runs Medicare and Medicaid, etc. Everything we do today will be fundamentally different 10 years from now, which is really exciting to think about.

Wow. That’s very different. I don’t think I expected that answer. But that’s very interesting. And I guess that’s very true because there is a lot of telecommunication for medicine for people who are in remote areas.

There are a lot of external forces that affect healthcare. For example, Amazon has huge implications for healthcare. The fact that our society can order their groceries from their phone instantly, means that you, as a consumer, expect that convenience in every facet of your life. Healthcare is one of the most outdated sectors. So, inherently, the dynamics of every other industry and the evolving expectations of consumers changes the game for healthcare.

What do you think is the biggest issue facing your industry currently or in the future?

Affordability. The cost of healthcare is unsustainable, and there many factors that underlie this phenomenon. There’s no single reason why it’s so expensive, but every player in the industry—pharmaceutical and device companies, insurance companies, hospitals, policymakers—has a role to play in bending the cost curve. All stakeholders must come to the table if we’re going to figure out how to make healthcare more affordable.

What advice would you give a student interested in getting into the health services field?

I would say, number one, ask questions. We so often have a tendency to feel like we need to know the answer to our own questions. If you reverse it, and you approach life where you are always asking questions…and you should be asking everyone you meet—whether they’re in healthcare or not—what they do, how they got to where they are, why they think something is the way that it is, what contributed to the status quo, et cetera. I think asking questions is what leads you to your own introspective view of what it is that you want to do, but it also opens up the doors to other fields and opportunities you wouldn’t know about. I truly would have never known about health services had I not asked questions. I was not exposed to it at Rice, but I was exposed to the people who could answer questions that ultimately led me to my current career path.

Second, take the time to actually understand the history of the US healthcare system. This will be invaluable in understanding why things are the way that they are, and how did we get to the point where we are at. Healthcare is a field where it is so easy to pass judgment and criticize. Yes, our healthcare system is lagging behind other countries. But there are many factors that contribute to why our system is the way it is, and you can’t even begin to start changing it if you don’t understand the origin of it.

I think informational interviewing is something that I’m going to be doing during my time in London and throughout my career. Do you happen to have any advice on how to best start off with that, or how to begin?

My approach to informational interviewing, which is different from networking, is actually more like storytelling …you’re seeking to understand someone’s story. Every person you meet has something unique and a valuable perspective to share, and it’s up to you to ask the right questions to uncover that story. And it’s often going to be the story that isn’t what you see on LinkedIn or on their resume. The default line of questioning is to ask “What is your job? What do you do? What is your title?” Instead you should be asking, “What motivates you? How did you get into this field?” “Did you plan on this? What was hard about it? How did this experience you did 10 years ago relate to what you’re doing now?” Asking questions about the person, rather than their job or resume, will give you so much more dimensionality to the individual’s point of view and career advice.

Did anything I ask or didn’t ask spark anything else that you think would be important for me to know?

The last thing I would leave you with is to embrace the individuality of your path. It’s okay if you can’t tell someone what you do in a word: “I’m an engineer. I’m a lawyer, etc.” There’s isn’t really a term for who I am or what I do, and I think that is so powerful. You should never feel that you’re restricted to a box that someone can put a label on you. People will always impose their ideas and views of how they think you should get to a certain path or outcome, or you may impose it on yourself. If you just do what interests you, and you continue to learn from every experience. You’ll eventually find your path. But don’t feel restricted to having to fit into a box just for the sake of having a label, because if you get focused on the label you will narrow your options.

Thank you for the advice.

When I was looking over the website and looking at what you were doing before this interview, I was trying to put a label on what you were doing. It was an instinctive move to be like, “Oh, what does this really mean?” And I think your advice of not putting it in a box or putting a label on it definitely makes sense. And understanding the intersectionality of the work you do, it’s not necessarily one thing or the other, but it’s a broad network of things.

For what it’s worth, I still struggle with it. How long did it take me to explain to you what I do? It’s not an easy one-sentence answer. If you look at prominent organizational leaders, most of them have had a varied path. The world has now become so interdisciplinary, and having a unique point of view and different experiences is actually what makes you more valuable. In healthcare, I see hospitals hiring people from Amazon and Disney, and they have no healthcare experience, but they’re bringing that person in for diversity of thought. If you look around, you’ll find that so many people’s career paths entail many diverse experiences, and those individual experiences build upon each other, and they’re not always related, or obviously related, in any way.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Claudia Zhu
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia (39.9° N, 75.1° W)

featuring Tatiana Schnur, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery and Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

Dr. Tatiana Schnur received her B.A. in Cognitive Science at the University of Virginia where she was an Echols Scholar and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Biomedical Sciences Undergraduate Fellow. She received her PhD from Harvard University in Cognition, Brain, and Behavior. She completed a three-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded T32 postdoctoral fellowship in neurological rehabilitation at the University of Pennsylvania and the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute. Dr. Schnur is currently an Associate Professor of Neurosurgery and Neuroscience at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX.

-From UTHealth

I’m not sure if you would believe me if I told you right now that you had superpowers. But if you consider the fact that humans are able to produce two to three words every second in verbal communication, draw from an average spoken vocabulary of around 40,000 words, and only make a mistake once every thousand words, we’re pretty remarkable. As humans, we have this ability that allows us to generate speech incredibly efficiently and accurately, yet according to Dr. Tatiana Schnur, professor of neurosurgery and neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, it is still “unclear what kind of information is required to produce language.” All we know is that humans are the only ones currently with this ability.

Dr. Schnur is one of the researchers who studies our ability to produce speech and understand language. She asks the big questions about how language works, such as “what information is in the system in the first place, how it is organized, and then how do you access it in order to use speech.” She designs rigorous paths to approach answering these questions. One way that Dr. Schnur conducts her research is by studying how and where the language system “breaks” in patients with brain damage who are no longer able to produce fluent speech. Consider a stroke, the equivalent of “taking a hammer to the system,” which impacts different people in different ways. By understanding how the damage manifests in patients, Dr. Schnur is able to deduce certain rules and test hypotheses based on the damage that the system has incurred.

Another area of Dr. Schnur’s research is working memory, which is one of the capacities that is used to produce words in conversation (think continuous flow of words). More specifically, Dr. Schnur is interested in whether one’s ability to hold on to information, their short-term memory, would help them produce longer strings of words. Recently, Dr. Schnur and her colleague Dr. Randi Martin published a paper that demonstrated working memory plays a large role in our ability to produce longer phrases of words, such as coming up with phrases like “the big red dog” as opposed to “the dog.” Dr. Schnur concluded that a possibility for recovery for patients who have problems producing multiword speech should focus on working memory rather than the language side. A number of potential types of therapy for patients with brain damage stems from Dr. Schnur’s research.

Currently, Dr. Schnur is working on a project to “assess the degree to which someone has a problem accessing the meaning of things.” Sometimes, stroke patients are unable to produce a word because they have lost the meaning of it. For example, a patient might look at a pair of scissors and say, “I don’t know how to use that anymore. I don’t know what it is.” In cases like this, patients have lost the meaning of the object such that they do not know what it is anymore. In other cases, patients might have “lost” the word, but they know exactly what an object is. For example, a patient might say, “I cut herbs with that in the kitchen. I use it to cut my daughter’s hair, but what is the name? I can’t get to it.” Dr. Schnur is more concerned with the semantic side of the issue. To investigate this, Dr. Schnur plans to study the semantic distance between the word that the patient wants to say and the word they say instead. Dr. Schnur described the phenomenon as the following:

The word that they produced instead of scissors was either close in meaning or really far away. If it’s really far away, it suggests that they don’t have that meaning anymore. But if it’s close, like they say “knife” instead of “scissors,” you know that they’ve got some of that concept there, potentially…So, they were supposed to say “scissors” and they said something else. How close was it to “scissors”? … people can make errors when they’ve lost the meanings of things, and so if they’ve lost complete meaning, maybe they’re really far from the target, but if they have some residual meaning, then the error they might make might be closer to the target.

Linguistics research such as Dr. Schnur’s has significant ramifications on another field, natural language processing (NLP). Intimately related to artificial intelligence and one of the biggest applications of machine learning, NLP lies at the intersection of linguistics, computer science, and information engineering with an end goal to program computers to process, analyze, and eventually produce natural language (such as conversations and written text). Similar to how neural networks are loosely based off of our own neural circuitry, much of the inspiration for the design of NLP programs is based off of the way humans are able to learn and understand language.

Dr. Schnur’s research can guide us closer and closer to unearthing the circuitry of our own minds and developing such a system that will be able to replicate our language and speech abilities. Many leading figures in NLP believe that the biggest open problems in the field are all related to understanding. The end goal is to create a system that is able to read just as humans do, but how we get there is far from clear. The two leading theories at the moment are innate biases and learning from scratch. Many NLP researchers believe that we should encode some sort of common sense and knowledge base into the NLP program before training it to process natural language, while other researchers who side with reinforcement learning believe that we want the model to learn everything from scratch. Dr. Schnur said, “if you want to generate a system that produces speech, like a computer program that can produce speech, and you want it to work very quickly, then maybe one of those human parameters is that we’re able to produce these words quickly because we can retrieve the meaning because all the things that are similar in meaning are grouped together.” Perhaps we are closer to reaching this goal than we think. One thing is for sure: the future of NLP lies in the midst of today’s linguistics research.

For more information on the biggest open problems in NLP, see
http://ruder.io/4-biggest-open-problems-in-nlp/

Highlights from the interview:

What led you to pursue your career as a researcher and to study cognition behavior in college?

My father is a physicist, and my mom is a linguist. So, I tried to cross those two interests, basically, and it led me to the field of psycholinguistics.

That’s the study of how language works. I did science fair projects in high school, and then I enjoyed doing the research, and I wrote that stuff up. I was a Westinghouse House finalist (now known as Regeneron Science Talent Search) so that made me think, oh I might be good at this, and I really enjoy doing it. I think I did three years of science fairs and science projects, then by the time I got to college, I thought, okay, I want to marry this interest I have in linguistics and how language works with something about the brain—about the biology.

Then I did research every summer in college. I worked with a neurolinguist who got his PhD from MIT, was at Massachusetts General Hospital. I worked with him every summer, and that also furthered my interest in wanting to pursue cognitive science.

Do you think your family really acted as mentors who helped you cultivate your interest, or was there someone else in particular that spurred on your career?

Both my parents. My mother was the one who introduced me to some old literature in the study of language and how we process sentences, from the ’70s, that was a little bit related to her thesis work. Then it was my father who gave me this idea about the scientific method and statistics and the way to approach the questions. You can have a question like, “How does the brain work?” or “How does the mind work?” but you need a rigorous path about how to approach that question. I was only in high school, but he got me started on it.

Could you tell me a little bit more about the research that you conduct?

My primary interest is in language production. So, we produce two to three words per second—of a spoken vocabulary of about 40,000 words—and we make a mistake only once in about a thousand words. We never think about this ability, that we’re able to generate this speech so efficiently. Occasionally we make mistakes, but, for the most part, we’re able to do it. However, it is still unclear what kind of information is required to produce language. Humans are the only ones with this ability.

It might appeal to you from a computer science perspective. The question I have is what information is in the system in the first place? How is it organized? How do you access it in order to use speech? Language production is the part that I’m particularly interested in, and I’m interested in the theoretical way of how any human is geared up after birth to learn language and then use it, and they become proficient, totally proficient, by age 10.

Then the other part of my research is thinking about some people who have brain damage, as they are not able to produce speech fluently any more. They have problems. So [we look at] what is it with the language system that they have problems with? From a theoretical perspective, if you take a hammer to a system like a stroke does, you can find out what the rules are of the system when you damage it in certain ways. So, you can test a hypothesis, and it will tell you about the type of information that is stored. For example, a while back, the person I did my PhD thesis with had a paper in Nature [a scientific journal]. [In that paper, they discuss different patients:] One who had lost the ability to produce verbs, and the other person lost the ability to produce nouns. What that demonstrated was that information was stored in different parts of the brain, so for whatever biological reason, the way we use object names and action names needed different biological circuitry in order to do it. I thought that that was really fascinating. I thought it was the coolest thing, that you could have this information that you never think about, and it could get damaged, so you have a deficit of a problem producing one type of word versus another. But that’s an example of where you can look at the damage and it tells you something about the system. This was before there was functional neuroimaging. I mean we had PET, but it wasn’t as good at that time. Now we can use fMRI and design experiments—get people to think about different kinds of objects or do things with language and then see which parts of their brain are involved.

So, you ask them questions and then see different parts of the brain light up?

You have them do tasks like language tasks. One of the earlier studies was how people name pictures of objects and then pictures of actions. You see different areas of the brain respond to these different kinds of pictures when you’re producing the name.

Oh, wow.

The other part of my research—so one is just very theoretical, how does language work, language production—I’m also interested in how we understand speech, but my focus in my career has been language production. But now I also focus on people who have brain damage as a result of stroke. So here, from a scientific perspective, you can look at a stroke to try to understand how language is organized, but also from a clinical perspective, you can try to think about ways to help people recover.

How does this help you understand how to help people recover?

For example, in some of my work with a colleague at Rice University—her name is Randi Martin—we were interested in whether one of the capacities to help you produce words in multiword speech, like in conversation, was working memory. Whether your ability to hold onto information, short-term memory, whether that would help you produce longer strings of words. We published a recent paper that demonstrated that. That yes, indeed, it’s not a language faculty, but you have this other cognitive capacity, working memory, that seems to help your ability to produce longer phrases of words. Groupings of words. Like the “big red dog” as opposed to just “the dog.” In order to produce a longer phrase…”I ate that very yummy bowl of noodles” instead of “ate the noodles,” working memory helps you to do that. And so, a possibility for recovery is that if someone is having problems producing multiword speech, instead of focusing on the language side, maybe try to rejuvenate or bring back their working memory. And by bringing back their working memory, you might get back their language.

Could you give me a little bit of background on how your research impacts natural language processing (NLP) research these days? So, a lot of the researchers in deep learning and machine learning are really focusing on the applied area of natural language processing. I would like to know if some of your research ties along with that.

I don’t do anything in natural language processing. But we do use deep learning algorithms, but the applications I could talk to you about are on the clinical side, this research side with stroke patients.

One of the projects we’re working on right now is to try to assess the degree to which someone has a problem accessing the meaning of things. After they have a stroke, you can have multiple problems in producing a word. You could not be able to produce a word for multiple reasons; one reason might be that you’ve lost the meaning of it. This sometimes happens, for example, with advanced dementia cases. You look at a pair of scissors and you say, “I don’t know how to use that anymore. I don’t know what it is.” They’ve lost the meaning of the thing, so they can’t even say scissors because they don’t know what it is anymore. Another reason you might not be able to say “scissors” is that you know exactly what it is, but you can’t get to the word. You say something like, “Oh, I cut herbs with that in the kitchen, I use it to cut my daughter’s hair, but what is the name? I can’t get to it.” Another reason might be that you can’t get to the sounds. You know what it is, you say, “Oh, it rhymes with this other thing. It has two syllables. It starts with an ‘s.'” Or someone might have problems with just moving their mouth. They can’t get to the motor programming to move their tongue to say the word “scissors.” They might go, “S-s-s-s.”

All of these might be reasons you can’t produce a word. So, we were interested in the meaning side. The semantic side. And if could we assess the degree to which, when they made a mistake naming an object, it was because something about the meaning had been messed up. The word that they produced instead of scissors was either close in meaning or really far away. If it’s really far away, it suggests that they don’t have that meaning anymore. But if it’s close, like they say “knife” instead of “scissors,” you know that they’ve got some of that concept there, potentially. So, we were using something called Word2vec from Google, that Google makes publicly available, which shows that out of huge ranges of text, the probability of which two words occur in a large sequence of text. And the idea being that if two words happen to occur in that paragraph, they probably share some meaning. Or in that word string. But if those two words are very far apart, then they are probably not in much correspondence, because out of all of this text, people never refer to those two things in the same breath. I use the word breath, but it’s over a sequence.

We took all the naming attempts from these patients, all the errors that they made, because we wanted to know how close semantically, in meaning, was the word that they produced to the target when it was not the right word. So, they were supposed to say “scissors” and they said something else. How close was it to “scissors”? So, we put it into Word2vec and said how close is “knife,” close in semantic distance, to “scissors.” And it gives back a number. We can do that across everything that particular patient said, and we can compare it to somebody else. And then we can say this person is very close on target. They tried to say “scissors,” but they didn’t quite get there, but they got a word that was close in meaning to the intention of the thing they were supposed to say. But somebody else was really far apart, like the words they said never occurred in those strings the Google database had.

That’s an example where they constructed these probabilities of how often these words occur, and we can use that information to get back to the brain and say okay, does this describe the semantic space that someone might have in their head? Because remember I said people can make errors when they’ve lost the meanings of things, and so if they’ve lost complete meaning, maybe they’re really far from the target, but if they have some residual meaning, then the error they might make might be closer to the target.

Oh, I see.

Oh, you know, cut. I don’t know the name of it, but it cuts. Right? Like they say “knife” instead of “scissors” or maybe “scissors” and “cut” occur very close to each other in a paragraph, so you know they have some meaning to it.

People have already shown this to a degree, that the errors that we make when we produce speech, we tend to—if we slip a word up, it tends to be related semantically. So, if you said, “Oh, I took my dog—I mean my cat—for a walk.” Those errors tend to be semantically related, so if you’re trying to generate an artificial system that produces language, one of the parameters you might use to organize that information is the degree to which things are related in meaning.

And so if you want to generate a system that produces speech, like a computer program that can produce speech, and you want it to work very quickly, then maybe one of those human parameters is that we’re able to produce these words quickly because we can retrieve the meaning because all the things that are similar in meaning are grouped together. So, this is a way you can sort of figure out what the rules are.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Molly Turner
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Thomas Forrest Kelly, Morton B. Knafel Research Professor of Music, Harvard University, Boston (42.3° N, 71.0° W)

Thomas Forrest Kelly is Morton B. Knafel Research Professor of Music at Harvard University, where he served as Chair of the Music Department from 1999 to 2004. In 2005 he was named a Harvard College Professor in recognition of his teaching of undergraduates. Before coming to Harvard he taught at Oberlin Conservatory (where he was the founding director of the program in Historical Performance and served as acting Dean of the Conservatory); he taught at the Five Colleges in Massachusetts (Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire Colleges and the University of Massachusetts), where he was the founding director of the Five College Early Music Program. Previously he taught at Wellesley College. He was a Visiting Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge (1976-77) and a Professeur invité at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris (1998).

-from Thomas Forrest Kelly

Dr. Kelly is an accomplished teacher of music. But he doesn’t teach students how to play an instrument. Rather, he teaches the history and appreciation of music. I had the pleasure of interviewing him over Skype while he was in the comfort of his office in Massachusetts. He sat in front of his own harpsichord and was engulfed in bookshelves. Now, professors of academia across many fields tend to be private, well-read, and perhaps not the most social beings, but after conversing with Dr. Kelly, I got to know both a true academic author of books and also a musician who has had a varied career in music directing, keyboard playing, and historical performance. It was a pleasure to get a glimpse into his work that equally involves historical research as well as live performances. His work and teaching beautifully combines the “then” and the “now.”

Academia and music schools are sometimes at odds with each other. Students attend music conservatories to get really good at their instrument, not to learn how to write a bibliography. But Dr. Kelly’s multi-faceted career bridges the gap between these areas. He currently teaches a graduate course at Juilliard where he works with performance majors. The course covers the premieres of five famous pieces of the past. It involves research at the New York Philharmonic Library, the New York Public Library, and even some time at Carnegie Hall. It also includes reflection on a modern premiere by a living composer. Engaging the great performers of today with research methods and historical awareness is one of the most interesting parts of Dr. Kelly’s work.

Dr. Kelly also continues to make a lot of music, whether at the harpsichord or at the helm as a music director. It’s perhaps akin to a Shakespeare professor actively performing Shakespeare live on stage. He has led choirs and directed historical performing groups, as well as curated a substantial summer music festival. His historical knowledge informs his live performance, and this is at the heart of why many people still perform medieval and Renaissance music. As a composer and conductor, I am interested in the interaction between academic and performing pursuits. Dr. Kelly’s career serves as a model for doing both.

I really appreciated Dr. Kelly’s unpretentious attitude and genuine passion for historical performance. There’s a bad stereotype of the stuffy pretentious professor, and he demolishes this stereotype. He joked he doesn’t even particularly like the word “musicologist.” He said it sounds like an unpleasant medical specialty, and most people don’t know what it is. When asked what he does, he responds, “I teach music, but I teach the history of music not the scales.” His attitude reminds me that there’s more to music than knowing all the notes.

Highlights from the Interview

Everyone’s family, community and life circumstances create an initial role for them in society. What was expected of you? And did you adhere to or stray from that?

I was raised by a single mother who was divorced from my father when I was eight. My mother and my two younger brothers lived in a university town in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I think I continued in the path that was set for me—in the sense that I lived in a university town, I went to the university there, and I’ve never been out of college ever since. I’m sort of in the seventieth grade or something like that. And the music thing, I think it came from being dragged to church. Nobody asked me if I wanted to go to church, nobody asked me if I wanted to sing in their junior choir. In those days, some of us did what we were told most of the time. As a result, these are things that became familiar with me. I wouldn’t say I’m much of a rebel. I think I followed in the path that was set for me.

What was your primary instrumental exposure to music?

I was sent off to prep school in the north. I went to Groton School in Massachusetts at the age of twelve. There was a big, still is, a big stone gothic chapel with a great big organ in it. The organ console looked like a cross between the machinery behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz and an airplane cockpit. It had a thing called a crescendo pedal that looked like a gas pedal, and when you pressed it down, a whole row of red lights went on and it played really loud. So, you name me a twelve-year-old boy who’s not going to say, “I want to control that thing.” It was really more a matter of power and technology than it was of music, maybe. But I started taking organ lessons, and while I was in that prep school I sang soprano, alto, tenor, and bass in the chapel choir. Not all at once; one after another. 

The result is that the music you’re exposed to becomes the music you’re familiar with, so I ended up knowing a lot of earlier music. Because organ music tends to be—not all, but a lot of organ music is eighteenth century music, and before, and a lot of church choral music is also relatively early music. So I got a lot of that under my belt without any particular effort, so that was a lot of my original music background.

Did you have someone who acted as a mentor, either starting in your undergraduate studies or after, that led you more into the historical, academic side of music? 

I can think of two people. One is my very nice piano teacher, Mrs. Gay. She saw me picking out tunes on a piano at a church supper and said to my mother, “This boy has talent. He must come to me.” I didn’t have any talent. I’m sure I was playing “See the Birdy in the Tree” or “Chopsticks” or something. But anyway, I went over to Mrs. Gay’s house every day because we didn’t have a piano. I practiced and took lessons from her. She was a wonderful, wonderful lovely lady. And then when I went into college, one other thing happened. I took a music appreciation course when I was in college because I knew, as all sensible people do, that it made no sense to be a music major. It was impractical. You’ll never get a job. So, I wasn’t a music major. I did something really practical and majored in French. I took a music appreciation course, where I knew the professor. His name was William S. Newman. He was a pianist but also a very distinguished musicologist. He said to me, “Tommy, I want you to stay after class. I want to talk to you.” So I did and what he said was, “You shouldn’t be taking this music appreciation course; you should be a music major. You know more stuff than you need to know to take this course. Why don’t you be a music major?” I said, “Well, thank you, Dr. Newman,” and went away. But within a couple of days, I was back in his office, and said, “Well, suppose I did want to be a music major?” He cobbled together a sort of emergency, last-minute music major for me, and I ended up majoring in French and music. It’s probably that combination of those two that got me a Fulbright to go study music in France. But if he hadn’t said that to me, if he hadn’t sort of said, “You know it would be okay. You could do this.” I think if he hadn’t done that, I don’t know what would have happened, but I don’t think I ever would have turned to music as a profession.

What led you to your current position, and what does your position entail? 

My whole professional career has been teaching as a faculty member in colleges. But at the beginning of it, I was mostly associated with and identified with and teaching what they called early music or historical performance—the performance of older music using historical principles. I started doing teaching like that when I came back from France and went to graduate school at Harvard. I got involved in being a church organist, and from there I got involved in being the conductor of a large community choir north of Boston. And then I got involved running a summer music festival for ten or twelve years, a sort of big music festival with a fairly big budget. I could do whatever I wanted to, so I did all sorts of cool early music things. We did baroque operas, we did medieval liturgical dramas, we did Viennese ballroom…

Where in the country?

It was in a place called Castle Hill in Ipswich, Massachusetts—a great big palace overlooking the sea built by Mr. Crane the millionaire from Chicago. The property is now owned by a land conservancy called the Trustees of Reservations. On that property, which had beautiful outdoor spaces, we built a little theater in what used to be the barn. We used various outdoor spaces and indoor spaces to recreate entertainments of various kinds from times past, and I engaged people from the United States and Europe to come and be a resident orchestra. So, I got some experience being sort of an impresario, and conductor, and harpsichord continuo player, and all that sort of thing. Partly as a result of that, some of my university teaching moved over in that direction.

When I had my first academic job teaching at Wellesley College, it was a series of sabbatical fill-ins. I did three successive one-year jobs, and then it got converted into a real assistant professor track. I ran their early music ensemble for quite a long time. From there, I moved to a job running what was called the Five College Early Music program. There are five associated colleges in Western Massachusetts: Smith, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, the University of Massachusetts, and Hampshire College. It was a sort of consortium. They decided that if they pooled their resources, they could have an early music program that served all five of the colleges, even though none of them had the resources to do it individually. So I was hired to create and run the Five College Early Music program. My next job was to be the first director of the historical performance program in the Oberlin Conservatory. 

That’s quite strong though, isn’t it? I didn’t know its inception.

Well, they had been doing early music at Oberlin for a long, long time. It’s a very famous summer program called the Baroque Performance Institute that’s been going on for twenty-five years or so. What they hadn’t had was an official named degree program in historical performance during the year in the conservatory. So the idea was to bring in one more person, that was me, who would coordinate the efforts of all of the people who were already there, and we would create a master’s degree in historical performance, have undergraduate courses, and all that kind of thing. Which is what I did, all while doing musicology. I had been teaching music history courses in all of these places and researching and publishing articles and books on my musicological field, especially, which is really early medieval music. I remember when Harvard posted an ad for a position looking for a musicologist in medieval music. I remember looking at that while I was at Oberlin and thinking…gee, if I played my cards differently, maybe I would be in line for that job, but I won’t apply because everybody thinks of me as being the early music guy. So I didn’t apply for it. But the head of the search committee at Harvard called me up. By that time, I was serving as the dean of the Oberlin Conservatory in addition to running the early music program. He said, “Tom, we’re trying to cast the widest possible net, and we noticed that you’d done some medieval music. Would you mind just sending in your CV, and I’ll throw your hat in the ring, you never know.” So I did. I would not have applied for the job if they hadn’t asked me to, and I got the job! I don’t know how that happened because I wasn’t there when they decided who to hire, but they did offer me a job, and I took it. I was there for many years, and I enjoyed it a lot. It was interesting though, when I went to Harvard. I swapped a job in which I did my scholarship on nights and weekends, and my day job was a music job, for a job in which the music was nights and weekends, and my day job was doing musicology. I missed the active engagement with music and musicians that I had in my previous jobs while I was at Harvard. Now I’ve retired, and for the moment, at least, I go down to New York and teach at the Juilliard School in their early music program. 

Wonderful.

It’s fun to teach. It feels like a homecoming, going back to teaching musicians in a music school, which I enjoy. Because there’s a challenge for teachers in that, it seems to me, in a music school, it’s not at all clear why you have to have classroom courses…They’d rather be playing bassoon scales. So the question is, “Why do I need to take these theory classes? Why do I need to take these music history classes?” And if you’re the classroom teacher, you’ve got to convince yourself that you can look ’em in the eye and say, “You will be a better musician if you take this course.” And if you can’t say that, and if you don’t believe that, then they shouldn’t be taking the course. They should be practicing their bassoon scales. It’s a challenge that you have in a music school that you don’t have in a university. 

What kind of misconceptions are there about your job? Do you prefer to be called a music history professor or a musicologist?

Well, musicologist always sounds like some kind of unpleasant medical specialty. It sounds rather pretentious, and I think a lot of people don’t know what it means, so when people next to me on the airplane say, “What do you do?” I say, “I teach music, but I teach the history of music, not the scales.” Because usually when you say you teach music, people assume you are a piano teacher or something like that. But I don’t mind the word musicologist as long as no one’s being pretentious about it.

I belong to the American Musicological Society, and I publish in the journal of the American Musicological Society and stuff like that. I have no objections to it. But art historians don’t call themselves “artologists” and literary historians don’t call themselves “literologists,” so I don’t know where we get off calling ourselves musicologists. 

On the other hand, you could argue that there’s far more to it than music history. There’s all sorts of aspects of the study of music as a scholarly discipline that are not historical in nature. But it used to be mostly history and mostly older music. The field has changed a lot in recent years, and it seems to be more about the cultures of the world and about the role of music in various social and cultural movements.

Going back to the “Why should I take music history?” question—maybe especially working with the musicians at Juilliard who…they want to win a job, they want to play the violin the best they can, they want to play the Brahms Violin Concerto perfectly, and they’re happy just playing that piece every day…What gets them to play Telemann? What gets them to play these older pieces?

At the moment I teach two sets of people. One is the graduate students in Juilliard’s historical performance program. So they’re already convinced that they want to play early music. They already have a baroque violin, whatever it is. They already have a classical bow and a baroque bow, and all those things. So I don’t need to convince them of any of that. They want to be able to play baroque music better than anybody else. But there’s a lot that they don’t know. They know their baroque music; they know their Corelli trio sonatas, whatever it is. But there’s a lot of stuff they don’t know. They’re having a good time. They got interested in reading old notation. They said, “We don’t know anything about medieval music, we don’t know anything about renaissance music,” so I’m putting them through a crash course in musical notation, and we sight read stuff out of Renaissance and medieval manuscripts sometimes.

That’s great because sometimes when I learn about that, it’s sort of spoon-fed, and it’s just the modern transcription there. But reading from the original source and seeing the squiggles and deciding what that means…

It can be hard to do that. You understand that that’s stuff that musicians made for themselves and it works great. Then there’s another group. I’m teaching another group at Juilliard who are—it’s called a graduate seminar. And some of them are DMA students and some are master’s students, but they are actually all instrumentalists, so they’re doing advanced degrees but on instruments. They’re not musicologists. It’s the first time I’ve done that, so I don’t know how that’s going to work. The course is about studying premieres of five famous pieces in the past. We’re studying five premieres in the past. How do you find the primary sources that let you know what it was like to be there at the first performance of Beethoven’s ninth symphony or Handel’s Messiah or whatever it is. And then each of them is going do a research paper on a twentieth-century premiere in New York City. 

Oh, I love this. I want to take this class.

So what I hope is that we’ll have a kind of history of music in New York in the twentieth century, done just on the basis of specific events. What it was like to go to a Boulez 2002 premiere? What was it like to go to the premiere of Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto in New York? What was it like to go to the premiere of Porgy and Bess, things like that? And students are going to have to write about the music and how the music works but also what was the venue? What else could you have done that week in New York? What was the place of music in New York in the 1920s? What was the place of New York in the musical world of the United States and the world? Stuff like that, trying to place these things in context. And they’re supposed to come up with this series of primary documents—reviews, letters—that they can find, any original conductor, performance materials if they can find them. So we’re actually going around to various places. I took a class last week to the Performing Arts division of New York Public Library, which is at Lincoln Center, and they have a very cool archive of all sorts of really neat things. They brought out all sorts of really neat things to show them how to do research in the New York public library, and next week we’re going to the archive on the New York Philharmonic to find out what kind of stuff they have…

What are some of the most exciting projects that you’ve ever worked on in your career, both as a musicologist and as a conductor ad hoc ensemble person?

Too many things to remember. One of my favorite pieces is a piece that I’ve had things to do with for many years. It bridges the performance and study—Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo. I don’t know if you know it. It premiered in 1607 in Italy. And I wrote a book called First Nights about premieres, and it’s the first chapter in that book. And I’ve been to Mantua and looked in the palace of the dukes where it was first performed, and it’s one of the pieces that I’ve performed in lots of different places. I did it in Oberlin, with students; I did it in my music festival. The first time I ever performed it was at Wellesley College where I didn’t know anything at all. But I learned a lot from doing that, and then I did it at Oberlin with the early music students, a lot of good kids. I did it at my music festival at Castle Hill with professional singers, and so on. So I’ve done it over the years in a bunch of different places.

I had a really interesting experience last year of touring with a group called Apollo’s Fire—they just won a Grammy just last year—who are a baroque orchestra based in Cleveland, and their director is a conductor named Jeannette Sorrell, who is a really good conductor. She does a lot of guest conducting with modern orchestras, but she wanted to do Orfeo. She asked me if I would give the preconcert lectures and come and perform and tour with them—they were touring around the country—and play second harpsichord and organ and regale and all that sort of stuff assisting her, and I said I would love to, and I did. And the thing is, the first time she ever played harpsichord continuo was when she assisted me at Oberlin twenty-five years ago in Monteverdi’s Orfeo. She said the first time she ever played, she remembered I said, “You just sit at that other harpsichord over there and play.” And she said, “What do you mean play?” I said, “Well, play the bass line, and if you think of anything else to play, play that.” She said, “The first time I’d ever played continuo, I had no idea what I was doing. I learned a lot by being thrown into the deep end,” so it was fun to join her twenty-five years later as her assistant. I got to play a lot of really cool instruments and had a wonderful time, and so I celebrated my seventy-fifth birthday on the road playing a piece that I started with thirty years earlier. So it’s a piece that’s followed me for many years, and I never get tired of. It’s one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.

And is it one of your favorite things when some punk rocker shows up to music appreciation and then you start out with Orfeo, and they’re like, “Who is this? What is this?”

Yes. I love it. I try to make it clear at the beginning that the world is full of lots of cool music that you can study, just not in this course. That this is a course in which I’m going to show you my favorite pieces—I’m the professor, and I get to pick. But I’m not trying to privilege this music over any other kind of music, and I fully respect that there are a lot of musicians in this course who probably know their music a lot better than I know my music. But this is what this course is going to have, and here are some other courses you could take if you don’t like this. But I really love this, and if you’ll stick with me, I think you will too. I think you’ve got to do it that way rather than say, “This is the good music, and your music is the bad music.” Nobody’s going to respect you. 

(Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.)

Molly Turner
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Ross Williams, Assistant Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (1.3° N, 103.8° E)

Before coming to Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Ross Williams was the senior lead instructor in audio production and post-production in the Digital Film and Interactive Media Departments at the Art Institute of New York City. He completed his master’s degree and doctorate in musical arts at Rice University in Houston, Texas. An Australian-born sound designer and composer, Ross has composed music and designed sound for theatre, museum installations, and award-winning independent feature and short films, as well as numerous concert works. His work can be found at fluidsound.com and Vimeo @rossawilliams.

I called Ross while he was in Singapore and I was back home in Seattle. Turns out, we both privately studied with the same professor, Dr. Gottschalk. But besides that, I didn’t know what to expect because he is a professor at a technology institute, not a music conservatory—that is, he is following a nontraditional path for a composer. We first talked about his background in Australia and his introductions to music, then we covered more professional topics like his graduate training at Rice, finding his first jobs, and the projects he’s working on now. We also bonded over bigger picture questions that ask what it means to be a composer or artist and how one finds meaning and work in a field that doesn’t have a set path.

Ross’s time after Rice shows an evolution from the traditional path as a concert composer. Ross was lucky enough to attend Rice to acquire traditional training and great connections, but he stated multiple times he didn’t want to be an “academic composer” or a traditional composer who finds their residency through a university. So, after graduation, he found other outlets for his creativity. He didn’t want to pay an orchestra a whole year’s paycheck to play his piece, so he learned how to mock up orchestras through sound libraries and MIDI playback. Long gone are the monarchy funded orchestras that sponsored many of Mozart’s and Haydn’s works; Ross had to teach himself technological skills and new ways to apply his musical training. He knew he wanted to collaborate with other artists, especially videographers, because he wanted his music to be combined with other types of art. This led him to independent short movies, museums, and audio production.

After he realized he wanted to collaborate, he transitioned into some sound design, which has many connections to music composition. And through his time at the Art Institute and lots of freelancing, Ross acquired a multifaceted career as a sound designer, teacher, composer, and artistic collaborator. Now, at his job in Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, he’s doing even more multidisciplinary projects. With his sound design background, he has been working on a volcano infrasound project well outside his designated role as just a sound designer.

Ross’s career path goes to show the tremendous changes the art world has made over the past century, even the past decades. Fifty years ago, before computers and the internet age, composers would go to school to learn to how to write concert orchestra music with pencil and paper, which was very much in the tradition of Beethoven and Mozart. Both Ross’s and my education reflect this tradition. We both learned orchestration techniques, traditional counterpoint and harmony, and how to write for the concert hall. But the concert hall is changing. Only a small demographic listens to classical music, and an even smaller crowd listens to contemporary classical music. It was really inspiring to hear that even though our careers as composers are rooted in the tradition of slow-moving trends, it’s possible in the twenty-first century to break from these trends by working in newly created fields related to our work such as sound design, multidisciplinary collaboration, and museum installations. Composers don’t compose by themselves at a desk and wait for their pieces to be performed; nowadays, they connect with other artists, use their background with sound to cross disciplines, and create music that is relevant to today’s audiences.

Highlights from the Interview

You grew up in Australia. What is the music education like and how did you get introduced to all of that?

Although my parents weren’t musical per se, they very much encouraged us to play instruments. I remember distinctly when I was five or six, my mom said, “Do you want to learn the piano?” and I was like, “Yeah, all right, whatever.” So I started piano lessons when I was pretty young. When I was ten, I was tested for musical facility, and I was recommended to learn another instrument, so I started learning trumpet. The instrument and the lessons were all provided part of the school curriculum. In Australia, certainly when I was growing up, we had sort of specific schools that were public schools that were target schools for music, where they had big programs. The high school I went into wasn’t a target school at that stage. Apparently it is now, but it wasn’t then. So we had no strings, so there wasn’t any possibility of doing strings; it was just basically concert band stuff, woodwinds and things. I played in concert bands all the way through high school. Australia’s generally like that. I mean if you go to private school, of course, then you get all the bells and whistles and orchestras and whatever you want. But in the public schools, specific ones might have string programs but many of them will not because they’re expensive.

Was your undergraduate degree in composition and trumpet?

I never had any intention of studying music at a high level. I originally started in biotechnology doing genetics, but when I realized biotech wasn’t for me, I took a one-year course in music at the conservatory of music as a trumpet major. I thought, “All right, this is cool. I like it. Let’s see where it goes.” I enrolled in the music education program and found out that they were starting a composition program, so I switched immediately to composition. So I never actually did trumpet as part of my bachelor’s; I was only a composer from then on.

How did you hear about Rice?

The teacher I started studying with asked, “What are you going to do when you graduate?” And I’m like, “I dunno,” like everybody does who does composing. So he said, “Have you thought about studying for your next degree in the US?” And I was like, “Eh not really, but why not? Let’s think about it.” So I applied to a number of places on his recommendations, and Rice was one that I got accepted into. When I got to Rice, I was like, “Wow! That’s an amazing building.” And it took me only a little while to realize how lucky I’d gotten getting into Rice as opposed to maybe some of the other places I may have gone to.

I looked at some of your work, and I was just wondering if you were doing all of those video collaborations and multi-media work at your time at Rice?

No, not really. When I was at Rice, I was just composing. I came from a background of a lot of electronic—not electronic music in terms of pop compositions stuff but as in I had bands in high school, and I was the keyboard player—and I grew up with computers. My dad built a computer in 1978 so I always had sort of tech side of things going on, but I never liked to use any of that in my music while I was in Rice. I have a bit of an aversion to any sort of electronic music, really, in certain contexts. If I’m going to a concert, I want to see people moving; I don’t want to hear buttons.

When I got out of Rice and I got my first teaching job, it was in a multimedia program. I was teaching sound. And, actually, going back one step, when I was at Rice doing my doctorate, Professor Gottschalk was teaching at a place called the Art Institute of Houston. He was teaching a sound course. He stopped doing it and asked, “Would you like to take over this course for me?” And I’m like, “All right, whatever.” So I taught about a year and a half there, and then I went to New York. They were starting that same program, so I just fell into that job there. I’ve only taught in media, and now I teach film.

When I left Rice, I only had a portfolio of just regular concert music. I built a whole other career that’s peripheral to what I studied, although related in a lot of ways. Because on some levels, sound is sound whether it’s music or anything else. When you’re organizing sound in space and time, then there are certain concepts that cross over all of them. While I was in New York, I met a lot of people who wanted music for things or sound design for things. So I just kept getting asked, “Can you do this?” Or I did some theater stuff, or I did some other things. So then when I met all these people, image people, were like, “Can we collaborate?” and I’m like, “Sure.” So I just end up doing these things based on relationships and then contacts and then people heard something and asked me to do it, and then I slipped more into film.

The problem I had as a composer for a long time, and I still have a little bit, is if I’m writing concert music, I always ask, “Why am I doing this? For who am I doing this?” I’ve got a little burned out. I didn’t want to be an academic composer. I didn’t want to write music for other composers. Why write something purely on it’s own anymore? Mind you, if someone said, “Hey Ross, write me an orchestra piece.” I’d be like, “Absolutely.” I would do it. But those things don’t happen. Least not—especially if you’ve chosen the path I’m on.

Sounds like you are “the” sound guy at the Nanyang University.

Anytime there’s a mention of the word “sound,” everyone looks at me. Which is cool in the sense that I just submitted a paper to a big journal on volcano infrasound that I did some work with some volcanologists on processing their infrasound so they can detect volcanoes more accurately, which is very peripheral. It started off with just a “Hey you’re a sound guy. I work with infrasound. Can you listen to this stuff and let’s chat.” And I’m listening to it, and I’m like, “This sounds horrible. Let me clean it up for you.” And they’re like, “Woah!” And that led to this whole research project. So that’s been fun, because if I was only writing music I think I’d get a little nuts, but if I was only doing non-music I’d get nuts. If I’m writing music, I’m always thinking, “I’m glad when this music’s done so I can do something else.” But then when I’m doing something else, I’m like, “I really feel like I should be writing music.” So I like that I have the freedom to do one or the other. The only problem is, of course, you get pigeonholed. You can’t be good at either of them because you’re doing two things.

It was really exciting to hear that you did a project where you had complete artistic freedom, because my impression is that rarely happens.

That’s the good thing about academia is I can just do. I take projects or leave them. I’m not required to do them. I don’t have to feed my family based on the outcome of them. Not all of them, of course. Some of them I have battles with directors—more purely narrative films will go into battle over certain pieces of music or the way that they’re written. The funny thing is, I’m almost always battling, telling them not to use music. I’m always like, “You don’t need music in this part of the film.” Because there’s a tendency for overuse of music in general; from my aesthetic, it’s used way too much. And the effectiveness of the music is diminished. The more you have, the less effective it is.

You learned all of these notation things in grad school, and how to write an orchestra piece, and what instruments are. But now when you do all of these multimedia things, how do you acquire the skills to learn Pro Tools or learn Logic? Is that you at the computer figuring it out?

It’s funny, I joke with all my students. I tell them I’ve never had a film sound class. I’ve never had any class on what I teach my students. I suffer like all of us do, me maybe more than some, with the imposter syndrome. You know, I’ve never taken a specific class in this subject that I’m now teaching you. But I’ve been, the last twelve years, working in it and reading papers and going to conferences and all those other things. But yeah, it’s all self-taught on some level. That’s sort of going back to composition. I’ve always loved orchestra and orchestration, and sound design for film is essentially an orchestration or activity on some levels. Am I adding wind here or something there. I’m trying to affect your emotional state or direct you in an emotional state or direct you in a certain way, which is very much what we do in an orchestra. So there’s a parallel there, at certain levels, of the skill set I think have brought across. When I say that no one taught me what I’m doing, that’s not 100 percent true. I took orchestration classes. Although they weren’t directed at that specific outcome, there’s an aesthetic or a sensitivity that you develop through that process that comes to bear on other things.

I think I’ve always been reasonably good at picking stuff up. Like we all do. You know if someone says—as a composer especially, as you probably know, you never say no to anything. If someone says, “Can you do this?” You always say, “Yeah.” And then you say, “How am I going do this?” and then you work it out or you get some help. So that was sort of how my entire life has gone, I think. I should have said no to a few more things, but—well, actually, that’s not true. Keep saying yes and then it forces you into places that you might not have wanted to go. And then sometimes you go, and you’re like, “Eh, that maybe wasn’t worth the while, but that’s all right.” And then you’ve done something else.

It does mean a lot of background research. Like I don’t have a background in volcanology, and I’m never going to acquire a background in volcanology. Though I need to know just enough of these certain things to be able to apply. But also, you can have ideas that you don’t have to execute—that’s another thing. You can have an idea and say, “Why don’t we try this?” And you don’t know how to do it, but that’s where you get somebody else to help you with it. And that’s something—as composers, we are very used to being very solitary. We do it, we write it, we notate it. 

The genius of you sitting at the desk and penciling it out…

It can be a little lonely. I still like to do that. I’m writing a string quartet right now, which is going to be actually one of my first concert pieces for ages. It’s going to be that, and it’s going to be mixed media in the sense that the sound from the quartet would control images behind the quartet, but there’s no processing of the quartet. It’s just a regular quartet. And this is the first one I’ve written for ages, and I’m lonely writing it. I’m still looking around—like pencil and paper and doing my stuff—and thinking there’s nobody to bounce this idea off of. That’s good on some levels because it forces you back into that world of writing music. I still like writing with pencil and paper…in this case a little keyboard. Even though I’ve got all the gear to realize it digitally, if I want to, I try to hold that off until it’s mostly written.

At the end of the day, nobody cares how you wrote the music if they like the piece. That’s the thing. I think, as the student especially, it’s valuable. But I don’t know if they’re doing it yet—maybe they are at Rice—but it’s a hugely important skill to be able to do really good mock-ups of any special orchestral pieces. To be able to realize them with modern sample libraries, which is pretty extraordinary. Being able to mock up your pieces is hugely useful. Because, let’s face it, we are heading down a path where more and more of the music you hear is going to be sample-based. I mean you go to an orchestra—all right, that’s going to be an orchestra.

Can you talk a little bit about how you ended up in Singapore? Because I think that’s crazy.

After I left Rice, I had one year left on my student visa so I went to New York with my friend Bram who was also at Rice. I was working as a waiter and trying to work out what I wanted to do. The art institute I had worked at in Houston started one in New York, so they needed somebody to teach. That got me into a teaching job. Eventually I became full-time and they got me visas. So I spent a lot of years there working and developing the film side and the multimedia side of my music and sound design and all that sort of things. Later, when they were closing that school, I went online and looked for jobs. There was a job at the Berklee College of Music of music in music production and composition, which I was shortlisted for and I almost got that one. Fortunately I didn’t because if I had gotten it, I probably would have taken it even though it didn’t pay very well. Then I saw the Singapore job online—and it was one of those rare ones where you look at everything they ask for and it was everything that I was doing. In New York I was a founding instructor in their film department, so I helped write the curriculum and all that, and they were looking for someone to revamp their curriculum here from the sound part. I just hit all the right things, and then obviously…also having a doctorate from Rice did not hurt at all…There’s a lot of people who work at sound for film who don’t have a PhD or DMA. I mean, there’s probably more now…but certainly, not many with as much practical experience as I’ve had as well. And my sister was living in Singapore. She had been for the last twenty-five years. So I knew it well, so I was like, “All right, I like Singapore.” It’s on the equator so it’s never winter. And it’s only five hours from my home in Perth. It was attractive on a lot of levels. Singapore is a young county and they’re really only recently developing their creative arts, so it was an interesting place. The film creative area is growing, establishing itself so it was sort of fun to be part of that process, and then the money is really much better too, as well. They pay quite well. The sad thing in the US is that most of the faculty type jobs, unless you’re in one of the big schools, do not pay well.

What advice would you give to yourself when you were college age?

I think the only advice I would give is try not to say no to anything. I’ve always had good friends and good colleagues so opportunities seem to pop up here and there. But opportunities also come through connections you make and just being easy to work with and also doing good work. So I would say to try to look at what you actually want to do, because you’ve got to be realistic. Like I had no intention—even when I was finishing my doctorate, I knew that I wasn’t going to be an academic composer. I knew that I wasn’t going to get a job in a university as a composer.

I think maybe I applied for one or two things as I left, but I knew that for various reasons…I think I wasn’t strong enough on the theory side of things. I had no problem with my actual music writing, but I wasn’t a natural theorist. I’m a pretty crap conductor. So I was like, “You know what, let me work on my strengths.” So I think having sort of a clear idea of where you might want to go is important. As we know with music…I often joke with this friend of mine…The thing about music is that if every composer in the world stopped writing music right now, nobody in the world would know. Nobody would know for…who knows how long, nobody would know. And that’s not to say that what we’re doing doesn’t have value, but it says in the pecking order of things, it’s a fairly rarified life that an academic composer gets to enjoy. And those positions, there aren’t very many of them, so if you want that then think about all the things you need to get there. You’ve got to be going to competition after competition after competition. You’ve got to be really, really great at all your theory and maybe conducting. You’ve got to know people. All of those things. It’s all right to do all of those things, but you’ve got to do those at the very beginning. That was something at Rice, I think, that was maybe lacking a little bit, that discussion. How are you going to get that first job, and what is that first job going to be? Because the first job is the big one, because that tends to be where you end up moving in terms of your first professional job in your field. Where I ended up working, well, sure enough, I ended up staying within that lane, or branched out,. Had I got the job, say, at Berklee instead of here, then I would have probably shelved all the sound design stuff and had to go purely into music again. I don’t know if I would have been happy doing that. But that’s sort of a complicated answer now. We’re all different, and it’s a super glib and easy thing to say to do what makes you happy. But happiness is not guaranteed by anybody. I’ve always been lucky in the sense that my happiness is not derived from what I do. It’s derived from just being alive and having a family and that kind of stuff, so I could have been happy probably doing a bunch of other things too. I’m lucky I wrangled it somewhere.

(Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.)

Mercedes Muñoz
Boston University
Boston (42.3° N, 71.0° W)

featuring Jenna Alton, Lab Manager,Boston University, Boston (42.3° N, 71.0° W)

I had the pleasure of personally interviewing Jenna Alton over the summer of 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts. As we started our conversation, I quickly realized that Alton’s insights regarding the post-undergrad job application processes, as well as her resilience and positive attitude, make her a wonderful source of information for anyone looking for employment after graduation.

Jenna Alton is a lab manager at Boston University’s Social Learning Lab where she works with applied human development and developmental psychology researchers studying the social and cognitive abilities of children. As a lab manager, Alton directs the Lab on an organizational level and also leads research projects of her own. Her current project, Career Essentialism, looks at how and why children associate certain careers with specific genders and races. Alton calls herself a “jack of all trades” and uses the skills she developed as an undergraduate to excel at her job.

Although Alton has been settled into a job she loves for over a year now, her road to Boston was not necessarily a straight path. As an undergraduate, she attended a small liberal arts college that was not necessarily “career oriented,” so she had to go the extra mile to search for the research opportunities she craved within her school. She participated in a program where students could build their own internships while receiving funding for a summer of work and ended up working at a neuroscience/psychology lab at the University of Chicago. Undergraduate internships similar to this one allowed Alton to develop her interest in research and helped her realize that research could be something she really enjoys.

After earning her bachelor’s degree, she began applying to graduate schools to continue her education in social psychology but unfortunately was not accepted to any programs. This is when Alton recognized she needed more experience in the field and began applying to lab manager positions. She says she “applied to thirty or forty jobs, and I think I went through about seven drafts of my cover letter and four or five of my CV.” This massive job application process took place within the span of about a year and a half. Because of the difficulty of finding opportunities in social psychology, Alton began to be more open about applying to jobs outside of what she thought her original interests were and expanded her search by applying for positions in developmental psychology labs as well. Alton says that her decision to be open-minded in the job application process helped her find a subfield of study that excites her even more than her original field did. Her current field aligns with her interests in ways she couldn’t see before. By broadening her horizons, she was able to increase her chances of employment and ultimately land a job she now really enjoys. 

Jenna Alton’s story is a prime example of how bumps in the road prepare you for success in the future. Whether it was applying to thirty to forty jobs or packing up and moving to Boston with a week’s notice when an opportunity presented itself, she truly demonstrates the benefit of embracing the bumpy path to post-graduation employment. There is a saying in Spanish that says, “todo lo que se siembra se cosecha” which translates to “everything you plant will be harvested.” I believe this powerful saying applies to Alton, but it can also apply to any one of us. Jenna Alton worked hard to plant her seeds, and although it may have taken her longer to enjoy the fruits of her labor, she has been able to harvest rewarding experiences and growth in her field.

A lot of us (myself included) have this plan, this idea, of what we think we know we want, and we have a strictly plotted outline of how we are going to get there. This may lead us to forget about the inevitable bumps in the road instead of preparing for them. With the search for jobs becoming increasingly more competitive every year, it can be challenging to maintain a positive attitude. However, if we can all practice the self-reflection and determination of Jenna Alton, we can all choose to plant our seeds with the expectation that we may not be able to control every aspect of the growth of our crop. Eventually, though, we will be able to harvest the fruits of our labor. The path to a successful career is rarely straight, but it is always fruitful.