School is a Waste of Time, and the College Teaching Resume

In an article cleverly titled “School is a waste of time” that I recently saw linked, a Canadian college student studying in the United States wrote of professors,

“Those who can’t do, teach.” This is a joke I heard a few years ago but it’s no joke at the U of S. Most professors have been in university since age 18 and have never actually gone into the “real world” they so often reference. If you were successful in your field, you would be out making lots of money at it instead of teaching moody young adults. We are being taught for the most part by people who are real world failures, not the ideal people to be instructed by, in my opinion.

Some professors have had jobs outside of teaching, but with these individuals, one must ask why they are now teaching if they could succeed in real life. Perhaps they tried and failed after a while, or maybe they just wanted the easy $100,000 a year with a nice pension. They are either quitters or lazy — shining examples for impressionable young minds.

Without going into how wrong the writer is we will turn on a dime and look at what you really need to have on your resume to win a tenure track college teaching job on an orchestral instrument. A resume geared to a job application is different than a vitae geared to a tenure process. The following things should all be easy for a search committee to find in the resume.

1. A job now in a closely related area either performing or teaching full time. It does not have to be at the same level as the job you are applying for but the closer the better.
2. At least a Masters degree or you will certainly be handicapped in the tenure process later.
3. Some significant teaching experience in your background, preferably college level.
4. Some significant performing experience as a soloist, orchestral, or chamber musician, preferably all three and at least one at a pretty high professional level.
5. Creative output, especially publications as they are easy for college administrators to understand, of a type that show you have potential to do more of the same and will keep developing your resume going forward.

There is no one formula for how to make a resume that shows all this clearly but it should all be easy to find on it. Always run your resume by someone who has served on search committees for similar jobs if at all possible so that you can be sure the essential things they would look for are easy to find. And if you are a student or young professional tracking toward this type of career be sure to try to have all five categories I outline above showing strong and varied experiences, this will guarantee your resume floating toward the top of the pile.

Ultimately part of what your initial application via the resume and cover letter is trying to tell the search committee is that you are someone who can put together a successful tenure case. Tenure is a very high hurdle for college faculty and seems to be getting higher each year. For some insider information on that, check this article. And for a bit more straight talk from the same source answering the student quoted at the beginning of this article, college professors in general don’t make as much as you might think [see this post also for more], with music faculty tending toward the low end of the scale.