I'm Looking for Gen X in Finance

And why I decided to become own artistic patron

My journey into the finance industry

These past four months have been a whirlwind of tiny achievements and professional challenges in my personal journey as a new financial professional. One of the industry highlights for me was when I passed the Series 66 exam in mid-April, which is a combination of the Series 63 and the Series 65 known as the Uniform Combined State Law Examination, which is a mandatory license for investment advisors.

For those of you that are you new to MIXTAPE or missed earlier newsletters, I changed careers from academia to finance for a bunch of reasons, one of which was to become my own patron of the arts and support myself (and the people I love) so that I can continue to write and publish books in the future on my own terms not the academy’s. Right now, I’ve got two novels in the pipeline and a second collection of short stories ready to roll and I’ll be revising everything until I find the right agent or small press. As I’ve been telling people, my night job hasn’t changed, but my day job definitely has.

Studying, Commuting, & Drinking Lots of Vanilla Oat Lattes

When I was in academia, the academy was my artistic patron. In return, I had to teach and mentor BFA and MFA students and do admin work and university service almost 24/7. That was the agreement. That’s why professors need the summer to write because they’re too busy not-writing during the academic calendar. As a professor, you receive artistic patronage but it’s always on the university’s terms. Compared to nothing, that’s a fucking marvelous arrangement.

But you shouldn’t be comparing your job to nothing. You shouldn’t compare your time or your art to nothing either. And yet all of us in academia do that because we have Stockholm Syndrome. We are in love with our kidnappers. We spend a lot of time defending universities because they keep us alive and because we value the dialectic of teaching and learning and artist creation. But when someone point out flaws in the academic salary structure, we tell them how much better our kidnappers are than those other kidnappers we’ve heard such terrible things about.