Ethnomusicologist Took a Nonlinear Path to Her Current Role

Name: Meryl Krieger (she/her)

PhD: Ethnomusicology, Indiana University Bloomington, 2009

What was your main area of research?

My discipline studies how people use music in their daily lives - sometimes as communities, sometimes through their technologies, sometimes how their roles as music makers or consumers helps them live in society.

My own research focuses on the technology piece, and I specialize in technology change. My dissertation research looked at how the change from analog to digital recording methods affects how the musicians and professionals within the music industry get navigated in the recording studio. It became how online platforms and tools connect with the very human impulse to crowdsource - to make decisions and form our ideas as communities of small or large sizes, and it led to the work I do now (I call myself a scholar-practitioner).

What is your current job?

I am a Senior Learning Designer at the University of Pennsylvania in the College of Liberal & Professional Studies. I am based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

My work is in instructional design, and I focus on online learning.

I work with faculty and programs to build and revise courses and curriculum in online learning at many levels (undergraduate, graduate, high school) for credit and non-credit bearing courses. I work with a team of professionals ranging from operations and administration through media directors/editors.
I also research new and coming educational technologies; at the moment I'm focused on generative AI (which is a kind of crowdsourcing!).
I also do curriculum assessment and run workshops on relevant topics for faculty and staff.
I engage with colleagues across my institution's units to learn and grow.
I work as a mentor as part of a group of senior instructional designers for an institution-wide onboarding project for instructional designers new to campus.

My role with faculty depends on the needs of that instructor and course - I work in a range of disciplines ranging from social sciences across STEM, but I also occasionally work with humanities courses. My role can be coach, project manager, pedagogy expert, technology guide, institutional onboarding mentor, and more.

I love so many things about my job. It's never the same any two days. Because instructional design (ID) needs shift as a program grows and develops, my position has shifted a lot in the 6 ½ years I've been on my current team.

I have a wonderful, collaborative team to work with, all of whom are as committed as I am to producing a stellar product and supporting our faculty.

How did you find this position? What were the career steps you took to get to where you are now?

Networking, primarily. I found a different position at this institution that I was applying for, and I reached out to a friend and colleague who was at this institution for advice about how to learn about that (other) job. He had learned through the ID community on campus and thought I'd be a fit. I applied - and he was right.

My path wasn't linear, at all.

BM in piano pedagogy ➡️ PhD in Ethnomusicology ➡️ Academic Advisor and Adjunct faculty member ➡️ career advisor ➡️ instructional designer

Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia?

So many reasons.

Working as an instructor is interesting, but it's also very isolating. It's hard to find other people who share even some of my interests in that world - mostly only at conferences, so I had to be really happy working mostly alone. I came to realize that although I'm an introvert, I really like working with a team, and I'm much happier when I can collaborate on a project, whether that project is an assessment project for the university or building a new course.

There's also, overall, good work-life balance. All of us have rich lives and many interests, and there's room for this range in this role. I never actually did walk away from formal teaching - I also teach (on the side) for the program I work on, and it certainly helps me do my day-job better! but it means I'm not dependent on that work to pay my bills.

What advice do you have for someone getting their PhD and looking to pursue a career outside of academia?

Lots of times, graduate faculty - while they're experts in their own discipline - just don't have the experience or expertise to help students explore non-professor career paths unless they're closely related to the area of research. Be wide ranging here. Reach out in your communities and get to know people doing other things. Staff on your campus have their own expertise, and can really be great mentors and potential colleagues - they were really influential for me!
I have lots of tips for interviewing for non-academic careers. The biggest one: remember that your research interests are just that - yours. It's not that they're not interesting, or important to you, but when you are interviewing for a job, particularly one outside of the academy, you need to learn how to communicate how the skills you've developed as a scholar, researcher, teacher, administrator, etc. are relevant to them and the position you're applying for. This last is really what they care about - everything else is icing on the cake.
People often fall into instructional design - I know I did. My path came because teaching was how I paid for my doctorate, and I happened to have a background in music pedagogy (I'm a degreed piano teacher, trained to teach piano privately and in classes!). When I got to graduate school, I had to figure out how to use this in my teaching role, so I found the communities on my campus where I could develop my skills. In my case, there was a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) community that was very active, and my campus Center for Teaching and Learning ran a lot of practical workshops. I went to every workshop my CTL offered, and about the time I graduated (and needed to pay my bills!) they knew me well enough to offer me an hourly job as a lab consultant - a role I now know is as an instructional technologist. It was my introduction to ID work - I didn't know the job existed! and I was hooked. I started by building my own materials and courses for my own courses, and also working with faculty on how to use campus tools and solve their learning design problems and puzzles. So in my last position before my current role, I began building online modules for students to use and testing them, as well as supervising an intern who wanted to learn some of these skills as well (he's now an instructional designer, too). So, when I applied for my current job, I had all the skills they wanted for the role: someone who understood teaching non-traditional college students, someone who had experience in the Learning Management platform that the campus uses, and someone who's worked with faculty to help them design programs and activities for their courses.
I have conversations constantly, and I'm always building connections to folks at other institutions. There are communities and professional organizations *everywhere*, and lots of them are free to participate in. Reach out and ask for informational conversations with folks doing the kind of work you think you're interested in, and ask them about what they do, what they do and don't like about their jobs.
LinkedIn Learning is super helpful, the POD community has been really helpful, and my own classmates and colleagues. Had I not stayed in touch with my classmates when they left town, I would not be doing what I'm doing now.

Are there any components of your identity you would like to share, including how they have impacted your journey?

Curiosity is key, and I'm very much an out-of-the-box thinker. It's really driven how my research went, as well as how my career has gone. I've learned to own this - and that wasn't easy.