Hey Professors,
What do you do to mark full circle moments or milestones in your life? Do you have any special rituals or things that you like to do? Do you take the time out of your busy schedule to acknowledge some of these important moments-whether they are personal or professional?
I’ve been thinking about this because I recently experienced both in the past month, and I’ve actually had a little time to process some of these recent events. This is a refreshing change of pace from when I used to be a full-time professor, when I felt like I was literally running from one thing to the next.
Major events would pass by and I wouldn’t have adequate time to reflect on what had transpired. I couldn’t take a beat in between things because there was always something that needed to be done, kind of urgently. Something else that was on the back burner in this grind of the academic life.
And that was a few years ago, before this time of dystopian polycrises that we are living through right now.
Let’s just acknowledge that there’s so much that is interfering with our bandwidth right now. It’s really not healthy or sustainable, in my opinion.
In this 56th episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I wanted to do things a little bit differently and share a few personal reflections on some recent milestones of mine with the hope that you too, can carve out some time to acknowledge and celebrate your own.
Reflections on a Full Circle Moment
So here’s one full circle moment that I wanted to share with you. A few weeks ago I was invited to be one of the keynote speakers at a Graduate Music Forum conference at Harvard University.
This is a conference that is organized yearly by graduate students in the Music Department at Harvard. And this year, it was thoughtfully curated and impressively organized by Zehra Jabeen Shah and Victor Arul, as well as other members of the Graduate Music Forum.
Employing the theme of “The Matter of the Porous,” the conference featured panels that considered the potentials and the limitations of a new materialist analysis in relation to the medium of sound. This 2-day conference convened 3 other invited keynote speakers (Kerim Yasar, Báyò Akómoláfé, and Michael Birenbaum Quintero) as well as 19 other panelists.
It was wonderful to be in conversation with other scholars and to learn about new areas of research and scholarship. On the second day, I also facilitated a workshop just for graduate students, which took the form of a focused listening session.
For the conference, I wrote a new paper based on my experiences of being a primary caregiver for my father. This was called “When Listening Meets Care.” It was a reflection on how different modalities of listening are invoked in the caregiving journey for elderly adults, and how listening can become understood as an act of care itself—with embodied, relational, and material dimensions.
And I want to give a special shout out to Nick Harkness for taking the time out of his very busy schedule to chair the session and to offer his thought-provoking questions and comments.
So how was this a full circle moment?
Well, when I was a second year graduate student at Harvard, I was the conference organizer for this very same GMF conference in 2007—which was, gulp, 19 years ago!
Our theme back then was “Music and Crisis,” which I would have to say—still tracks today. And to top it off, the room in which I presented my keynote was the same room where I taught my very first discussion section as a Teaching Fellow.
In 2007, my younger self (and this was pre-general exams younger self) was super stressed out, dealing with imposter syndrome, and struggling to keep up in a challenging academic environment. The exercise of organizing the conference, however, was something that came a lot easier to me, since I had worked in arts management in South Korea prior to starting my PhD.
It reminded me that I came to graduate school with a set of skills that are pretty useful, like:
• knowing how to plan an academic event,
• knowing how to handle the behind-the-scenes details and logistics,
• understanding how to fundraise, and
• knowing how to gather people together.
Back then, I could not have imagined that I would be invited to be a keynote for the same conference that I organized. So it was really lovely to be invited back to my alma mater for this experience and to also get to know some of the current graduate students and graduate students from other programs.
It was a very sweet full circle moment that gave me a lot to reflect on, since SO much has transpired in the past 2 decades! I know that I’ve come a long way.
Reflections on a Personal Milestone
On a similar note, the second thing that I wanted to share with you is the milestone of turning 50 recently. Yes, I know, that’s a big one!
Now when I was a faculty member, my birthday always seemed to fall on a workday during an incredibly busy time of the academic year. As we know, spring quarter or spring semester is usually very hectic and I don’t remember having many chances to take time off for myself.
I remember a few times even having to present papers at conferences or symposia on my birthday.
In any case, this year I had the space to fully enjoy the day, relax, connect with friends and family, and not do any work whatsoever! It was fantastic.
And though I’m just a couple days out from my birthday as I record this episode, I have been thinking about the different personal and career milestones that I’ve managed to go through.
I’m not going to bore you and spend time going over these now, but I have been able to take an actual pause for reflection…something that I couldn’t really do effectively when I was a faculty member because I was so often drowning in work.
I feel grateful that I have had the opportunity to have a few distinct chapters in my life thus far—as a musician, a scholar, a professor, and now as a coach and as a caregiver. And I’ve talked before on this podcast about the challenging decision that I was faced with a few years ago about leaving my faculty position.
Somehow I knew that if I was going to make a big career move that it would be better for me to do this earlier rather than later in my life. So I’m glad that I took the steps a few years back to explore what a meaningful pivot could look like for me, to test it out, and to build the necessary skills and mindset to become a certified coach, in particular serving women of color faculty in higher ed as well as academics who are considering career transitions.
So I’m curious to see what the next decade and chapter holds for me.
I’m also grateful that I am still able to engage with research in new ways. After walking away from my tenured faculty position in a small field, I didn’t make any assumptions that I would be able to continue to do research or to be invited to give research talks.
But interestingly enough, I’ve been able to do both. And it’s nice to still flex this muscle and also apply my research skills to new topics like coaching in higher education as well as exploring the importance of active listening in the caregiving journey.
As I discussed previously in Episode 48, one’s research certainly does not have to end upon leaving academia—unless you want it to. I know that this is an area of concern for some academics who are in the earlier stages of considering this pivot.
It’s true that there are going to be challenges that come up—like the loss of an institutional affiliation, the loss of library privileges and funding, and then also dealing with the Ivory Tower snobbery that can be cast against a self-identified independent scholar. These are definitely obstacles—no doubt about it.
But it’s also true that your expertise, your research skills, your critical thinking and writing skills do not evaporate once you leave higher education.
These are valuable skills that can be used in other sectors of society. In fact, it may be desperately needed.
So by reframing your research beyond your disciplinary home and/or writing on topics that require your research skills, you may in fact be able to reach a much broader audience.
This is something that I’ve been contemplating as I’m trying to think about my research more expansively and to turn some of my efforts towards researching and thinking about building communities and systems that really center care. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes!
In closing, I wanted to end with two questions, especially as you finish your academic year and head into your summers:
1) When’s the last time you really reflected on, acknowledged, or celebrated your full circle moments and your milestones?
2) And if you haven’t had the time to do so, do you think you can intentionally build in some time to do that this month?