What it's like working as a scientist and media composer

So if you’re reading this right now, chances are you already know this about me.

Maybe you’re wondering…

How do I feel about making money from a day job and doing music on the side?

Well, I’m grateful that I can have an alternate source of income that isn’t difficult to maintain while I compose music freely, but it has very high ups and very low downs. Some days I feel suffocated working in an environment where I do almost the exact same things every single day and wish I could just call it quits. It can feel like I’m on the verge of a mental break down.

Other days, I’m grateful that I don’t have to demand my music to make money for me and am happy that I can take my time, pursue opportunities purely for the artistic endeavor and not for how much a director will pay me.

Whether I’m loading tubes of urine into a machine or writing music though, both leave me exhausted at the end of the day if I do it long enough. The catch is that one of them I would do gladly for hours on end, over and over again. And that is constantly at the forefront of my mind.

When I started working as a scientist, I already knew that I wanted to spend my days composing. By this time I had written music regularly for myself just for fun on piano over the past 10 years, through an Instagram 30 scoring challenge I made up, and taking lessons from a composer I admired who graduated from the USC Screen Scoring Masters Program (looking back, this was a very smart way to get some education in the field without the price tag).

This habit of getting myself to sit down and write in a limited period of time on a regular basis was already part of my creative practice, which was great going into my day job. However, after experiencing the 8 hour days 5 times a week, I realized in horror that at this rate a significant part of my life span would be shuffling around human bodily fluids in air conditioned buildings with little to no windows.

So with all of this in mind, I try to write music and create like my life depends on it. I feel that this could be an ideal situation with an optimistic frame of mind, but sometimes my impatience and anxiety get the better of me.

Regardless of how I feel on any particular day though, I try to stay positive and let myself start anew the next day.

TLDR: Working as a scientist and media composer is hard.