Sometimes having a bad job isn't a bad thing
I don't like my job.
I like the benefits, and having normal hours, and getting random holidays off.
But I don't like the job itself. It's incredibly boring, trained-monkey work, (push button, insert paper, repeat) coupled with having to be friendly to people (co-workers and customers both) I wouldn't spend two seconds with. My co-workers are mostly OK, but the one or two who might be fairly intelligent actually like "business" and finance. They're the people who actually care about making as much money as they can, and preferably by playing with other people's money.
Plus, I have to call the customers by their names, which creeps me out when people who have never seen me before do it to me.
But I've decided this is a good thing. Because it's made me really want to get my stuff together and apply for Grad school. Not because I feel I should, but becuase I don't want to spend the rest of my life banking, or doing some other crappy job to pay my bills.
Here's the other thing I've realized. I don't really want to get a performance degree. I still want to do music, and I still want to perform, but I don't have to get my Master's in performance to do that, especially as I am more interested in doing early music than opera. To get a perfomance degree I'd have to spend nearly all my time working on me-singing, acting, being a diva, and I don't care that much about me. As I think back on my Undergrad, I've realized that the things that were most rewarding for me were my scholastic studies, and the times I really got to do in depth research, and I preferred reading to practicing. Apparently, I'm too big a nerd to be a diva. So I'm looking at Musicology programs (which is aparently what they're calling music history these days). BU has a good one, of the schools I looked at while I was trying to apply last year. I'm going to look at some of the Boston-area non-music schools, and see if any of them have programs I'd be inerested in. I'd love to find somewhere with a strong medieval/early Renaissance focus, as that's where my musically nerdy heart lies.
My only stumbling block at this point is references. I need generally 2. There's one of my NU teacher/director people who I can probably get a good refence from. But from my Googling, it seems she's retiring to Arizona or somewhere like that at the end of the year, and of course, being me, I haven't kept in touch with her at all. As for my second, I could try to contact my voice teacher from my Jr/Sr years, or possibly another music history prof, as I'm thinking of using a paper from one of her classes for my application.
Suggestions? Thoughts?