By J. Khan '09
May 3, 2021
Listen here or read below.
Good Morning or Good Evening or whenever you exist.
To briefly introduce myself, my name is Justin Khan. I attended Tunxis starting in 2007 and got my associates in General Arts and Sciences; I then transferred to CCSU, where I majored in Pure Mathematics with a Minor in Physics. Currently, by day—for insurance—I am an Operations Specialist with The Music People Inc. and On-Stage Stands. Separate from that, I’m also an AudioEngineer/Producer at—and small business owner of—The Amorphous Void Studio...as well as an assistant mix engineer at Silver Bullet Studios.
SO: I’m a musician, producer, writer, performer, engineer...and obvious victim of hustle culture.
Because my background is so wildly varied and diverse, I’ve been able to find a richness in the things I do, specifically because synapses have been crossed in many interesting and subtle ways.
Through learning calculus, I became acutely aware of the nature of sound waves, how they congregate and collect in spaces.
Did you know that amplitude (volume) fall-off for a sound source halves as the distance doubles, but bass and sub frequencies carry much further than high-energy (high pitched) sounds?
Is your mix going to be used at an outdoor venue or indoor? Because now that matters.
Are you pressing it on vinyl? If your mix isn’t treated properly, the top end will blow out your record, and low-end won't translate through the needle based on the
actual physics of the medium. You need to adjust accordingly—just hitting play on an iPhone into a bluetooth speaker doesn’t scale up to an outdoor arena.
These are things you can for sure learn through experience, but oftentimes, "Learned through experience" is gussied-up terminology for "I had to learn this the hard way."
With the current nature of the Internet, social media influencers, hustle culture, income inequality, and the fact that money somehow just seems not to be a “real thing,” it's very easy to get caught up in a very singular vision of one’s future. YouTubers can become millionaires before they lose their baby teeth, and Twitch streamers are running Minecraft random seed runs forty times a day to exhaustion—but also living in a mansion with a pool they can fit their childhood home in.
It's easy to see this and conclude that YOU, TOO will be the next successful so and so in your field by focusing on, indeed, YOUR field and NOTHING else.
It's great to be driven, but at what cost?
I believe interdisciplinary learning is an indispensable avenue for avoiding early age burnout and keeping yourself nimble in wildly changing times.
Are you an artist? Do you live and breathe art? I’m sorry to break it to you, but because you didn’t take a class in economics and/or computer sciences, you’ll have to wade through whatever an “NFT” is instead of working on what you love.
In other words, it’s often not enough to be “just” an artist, or just an economist, or just a computer scientist, or just…about anything.
Specifically, because of my math and science background, I understand the dynamics of how microphones and sound work and operate. Bass frequencies congregate in corners; square rooms create reflections for microphones and monitors that need to be accounted for; and multi-mic placement on a speaker will cause phase issues. I can calculate out wavelengths and know that this second mic needs to be adjusted X-distance back to remove phase cancellation.
Do you know what any of that means? If not, unfortunately, you wouldn’t pass the equivalent of “Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Studio” test.
When you get out into “the real world” and look for jobs, unless it’s for a massive corporation with a billion job titles with very specific roles set in stone, you won’t be doing just the job you applied for. At my current job I was hired for one position, and have since moved departments twice and gotten promoted twice—all based on the fact that my background is so wildly varied that whenever an opening formed and help was needed, I was there.
And when I was seen to be useful and agile, the effort was rewarded. Also, one absolutely never want to be that person that hits “reply all” with a passive-aggressive “That’s not my job.” The person who takes the task and gets it done is the person who’s going to get the salary that can afford healthcare.
It makes sense to conclude that your worth in the working world is either that you are the absolute best at something OR you’re the most useful at many things. Being the best is always a gamble, because there will always be someone better at it and if they apply, you’re toast.
However—and here we return to our theme of being an interdisciplinary thinker—if you’re very good in your specialty and can pepper in added qualifications, the proverbial “Jack of All Trades” usually wins out.
I can tell you right now, if you want a desk job, telling your interviewer you know how to make pivot tables and do Vlookups will move you from the amateur to the big leagues. Taking a Public Speaking course (an absolute must for EVERY student) will help you understand the way you need to speak during that interview.
Honestly, maybe you just grab DHY275 and yell at your dentist. Maybe that’s worth it for you. No one knows.
So maybe Hustle Culture hasn’t completely burned you out yet. Let’s say hypothetically that you want to start your own business. Maybe a bakery. Your first year, you net $40K. That’s not too bad for a first year. So you do all the accounting yourself—easy enough. You go to pay your taxes—and realize your bookkeeping is kind of...horrible.
Consequently, you lose out on itemized deductions and instead of getting a return, you owe the IRS a huge chunk of your profits. And then next year you have to pay people to do these things for you. It turns out that because at some point you were certain “math is dumb,” you lose out on thousands of dollars and have to hire outside help and spend even more money on your own business.
So yes, it can appear that lots of “filler classes” and “easy credits” can be a waste of time with junk info you don’t think you’ll really need to learn. But it’s completely on you whether you’re truly getting your time wasted by the class or just wasting your own time through intellectual laziness by assuming your time is being wasted.
The attitude that runs “When am I ever going to use this?” is guaranteed to set you up for failure—a lifetime of learning the hard way. Instead, you should be asking, “Where—and in how many different ways—can I apply this knowledge?”
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