Rock Star Something
When I was growing up, I wanted to be the same thing everyone else did. I wanted to be a rock star. Sure, not every kid is as cliche as I was, picking up a guitar at sixteen and dreaming of being in Soundgarden, but everyone wants to be a rock star something. If you want to be a teacher, you want to be Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, with your students standing on their desks saluting you for changing their lives forever. If you want to be a scientist, you want to be the next Einstein. I even had a friend who in her first year of accounting school dreamed of being Eddie Vedder's accountant. A rock star accountant.
By the time I realized I wasn't going to be in Soundgarden, I was in my first semester at Arizona State University, and had no idea what to do with my life. My first thought was that maybe I could still be a professional musician. Study in the guitar performance program and still make a living doing something I loved. But did I really love it? Looking back, its hard to say. I have vivid memories of loving it. Times when I felt really connected to the music. But those moments were too few and far between. Most of the time my playing was mechanical. I wasn't expressing myself as much as just playing what I'd memorized like some glorified player guitar. Eventually I came to the conclusion that guitar would just be a hobby. What now though?
It's hard to remember exactly how I decided on engineering. I know my dad was pushing hard for it, but I'd like to believe it was more than that. I'd also like to believe that money wasnt a big factor, but I think it was. Things are different now, but in 1996 an engineering degree was still pretty much a guarantee of a good, high paying job, and I liked the idea of making a lot of money. I also liked that engineering was so challenging, something not that many people could do. My thought was, if I can get an engineering degree I can do anything. But what kind of engineering? Rock star engineering of course.
I'd always been into audio gear - guitar pedals and recording equipment and that kind of thing - and thought maybe there was a type of engineering for that. I did a little searching and found out about this whole field called audio engineering. Basically audio engineering is electrical engineering and programming with an emphasis on audio technology. It was perfect. For one, any kind of electrical engineering was considered very hard, even by engineering standards. If I got an electrical engineering degree I could really do anything. And most importantly, I could still be involved with music. I imagined myself inventing the next wah wah pedal. I decided that if I couldn't be on stage in front of thousands of screaming fans, I would invent something that would change music in the subtle yet profound way the wah wah pedal did. I mean, just image what Jimi Hendrix would sound like without the wah wah pedal. Can you?
Doing a little more research, I found that there were actually three colleges with respectable audio engineering programs, but that the best was at the University of Miami - Florida not Ohio. It was an expensive private school that I was going to have to take on massive student loans to attend, but hey, I was going to be a rich engineer soon enough. Debt is the American way, and I'm only in college once. Might as well get the hell out of Phoenix and go somewhere more interesting.
A year and a half later I'd repaired my GPA enough to meet the bare minimum admission requirements for the University of Miami and was leaving Phoenix in the rear view mirror of a U-Haul headed for Miami. It was one of the best moves of my life. The audio program was great. I got to take classes on studio recording in a multimillion dollar studio, learned the mathematics of audio and wondered at it, did interesting projects manipulating audio in myriad ways. I made great friends I never would have met if I hadnt left. Everything was going along swimmingly.
Then something funny happened. During my last year in the audio program 2002 - the dot com madness that had fueled an insanely good job market was crashing and burning along with my job prospects. Where in previous years there had been nearly 100 percent placement in the audio engineering program, 2002 saw nearly half the senior class graduating without jobs lined up. The companies I wanted to work for simply weren't hiring, or not hiring me in any case. I'd had one hopeful interview with Dolby, which would have brought me to San Francisco four years earlier, but they didn't end up hiring anyone from our class as they'd done in almost every other year. In the end I only had one job offer. One that I couldnt take. It was a job at the big local power company Florida Power and Light. It didn't even involve electrical engineering, just supervising construction of new substations going in all around the state. They said they couldn't tell me where I would be working yet, but that it might be rural, real rural.
The rest of the story leading up to my current position as a rock star engineer/analyst/technical writer is pretty much a repeat of the story up to this point with variations. I've chased one rock star dream after another, always coming up a bit short. To date, I have never been in Soundgarden. I don't even listen to them much anymore.
What I have found though is that even if you never realize your dreams, following them will still give you the best life possible. For all my lamenting about not being a rock star, life is good. Ive got an interesting, satisfying job. Im starting my life over in one of the best cities in the world. And who knows, maybe I'll even become a rock star freelance writer....
