5 Years From Now
“Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” Such a difficult question for a millennial. Honestly, I don’t know where I see myself. However, I know what I want for myself. The trivial things like a house, car, and such of course. Beyond that, I would like to find myself in an opportunity to perform music again and possibly teach as a part-time afternoon instructor for marching band or indoor percussion.
As far my career, my true dream is to find a way to bring my skills and knowledge to the field of music education in a higher education job. I feel, and have long felt, that music education is on the cusp of an evolution into a modern era of teaching where the focus is balanced between the theory, history, and performance of music rather than the performance-skewed scale we often see in today’s music classroom. I believe technology is the bridge to finding that balance and I hope to one day be a part of that advancement. I keep my toe in the waters doing things like writing for the North Carolina Music Educators Association Journal and working on a textbook detailing my own theories and findings from the intersect of personal experience, instructional design, instructional technology, and my education in music.
In the meantime, I would really like to find a career that pushed my boundaries in web development into the higher education field. Seeing how web design and development can assist in the delivery and consumption of education is something I find fascinating and the development of new and complex systems to do so is one of the few things I find myself losing hours in a day doing. Even in my work as a freelancer, whenever a client presents me with a challenge I find myself losing hours and hours trying to solve the riddle to the solution. That’s one of the reasons I started developing the JBTheory Core Plugin in the first place; to give a framework for figuring out the more complex puzzles in the future.
In conclusion, where I see myself in 5 years is somewhere on the path to my long-term goals, comfortable with advancing by climbing the rungs in the very tall ladder I’ve put myself on since the beginning of my career.