I'm a Music Therapist

How does a music therapist deal with unemployment? My last few months have been spent searching job boards, submitting resumes, and even doing a few interviews, but with little success.

Five months out of internship and three since becoming a board-certified music therapist, I haven’t found employment in my field and I’m left with a nagging sense that my career is being postponed. Coming upon new and unforeseen hurdles while trying to find any kind of music therapy employment has led me to a scary question for myself: How viable of a career is music therapy?

I’d like to footnote this with my commitment to pursuing a career in music therapy. Working with medical and psychiatric patients put me in touch with music’s power to heal, comfort, rehabilitate, and lead people to meet their full potential. I am convinced of music therapy’s biomedical effects and its efficacy to make a meaningful and measurable change in many areas of life. Despite these convictions, making a living with such important work is not encouraging and prompted this investigation.

While I was in school and hadn’t yet encountered this employment reality, it was easier to brush off my worries of the weak economy and music therapy’s sub-mainstream status in the public mind. I was given vague promises by professors and speakers that there weren’t enough music therapists in the world and that my work was going to be welcomed with open arms. And how could the public not want music therapy? Our work was amazing and personal and good PR. As a student, no one discussed with me how to cope if I couldn’t find work.

Still, I worked hard to make myself marketable, earning dual degrees in music therapy and psychology. I started attending conferences my sophomore year to see and be seen in the professional circuits. I chose an internship offering the widest variety of patients I could find and volunteered to work at a second hospital to gain experience with adolescents and patients with eating disorders to diversify my resume. Currently, I am trying to jump head-first into the professional world. I regularly attend independent music therapy supervision groups to be mentored by and connect with other professionals in the area. I speak at professional conferences. Still, it’s rare that a job opportunity opens up. What piece of the puzzle am I missing?

My story doesn’t seem to be special among music therapists. I spoke with an ex-music therapist who was the first person that didn’t dress up the employment environment. She had worked in the Chicago area as a music therapist for about 7 years before deciding to go back to school to study speech and language pathology because she couldn’t find steady work with her bachelor’s degree. “Most music therapists I know either have a second job to make a living or get married and are supported by their spouses,” she told me. As I reflect on my network of new professionals (aka former classmates), I can group many of them into either of these categories. It’s also not difficult to name a handful who aren’t even working in a related field to music therapy after internship.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to find statistics about unemployment in music therapy. The American Music Therapy Association’s membership profile that collects annual statistics about my career doesn’t provide any numbers regarding un- or underemployment. Indeed, the survey with which they collect data doesn’t give an option to express unemployment. It only asks “Are you a practicing music therapist?”. When filling out my survey, I wondered if my data would carry any weight as I couldn’t answer 95% of the following questions because I wasn’t working. It seems that my professional organization doesn’t look closely at these issues, however prevalent they are according to my informal survey of classmates.

Of my new professional colleagues who are working, there seems to be an overarching theme: finding work in music therapy takes time and flexibility. Many who find work shortly after internship don’t work in the ideal situation I was expecting before graduation. Rose Fienman, MT-BC, slowly built up part-time jobs in both music therapy and related fields. Another, Allie McNay, MT-BC is working full-time with benefits as an “Activity Leader”. Wonderfully, she is regarded as a music therapist at her workplace, but admits she is “currently trying to figure out how music therapy fits in [her] site”. Others are lucky enough to get jobs at their internship sites, but may be asked to take on administration responsibilities.

Trying to expand my employment horizons, I’ve begun applying to jobs with varying titles including “Expressive Therapist” and “Mental Health Professional”. But the job titles haven’t been my only hurdle. I’ve been formally told that I don’t meet state requirements for titles such as “Developmental Therapist” because my training and certification don’t meet government requirements. Without state validation, funding isn’t available to my credentials. Another non-profit agency hired me to start a music therapy program only to withdraw the offer after they discovered I didn’t meet  the Medicare Waiver’s reimbursement qualifications. To meet the second job’s qualifications, I would have to become a Licensed Professional Counselor which requires a Master’s degree.

So I’m starting to look at graduate school as my next step. My career plans always included getting a Master’s, but I wanted to have some prior work experience to make my studies more meaningful and applicable. But as I evaluate who is actually working full-time in music therapy through my supervision group and multiple internship supervisors, all of them hold Master’s degrees, many of them as equivalency students. Maybe an advanced degree is the solution. But this raises even more questions. What are the chances I’ll find work with a Master’s? Will the incurred debt balance out the fairly low salary of a music therapist? Should I be diversifying my degrees?

Another option is being a self-starter. I’ve considered beginning my own practice or finding independent contracts in the area. But again, I’m faced with many challenges. I don’t know the first thing about running a small business and there are many related costs that I can’t afford. Just the seed money for instruments is out of my budget as I struggle to pay student loans and bills. Plus, I would need to educate myself about marketing, accounting, and other basic business skills. It’s not unachievable, but is daunting to someone just starting out. I have sent out cover letters introducing myself to local agencies without music therapy programs, but didn’t receive positive interest. Of course, I’ve heard that personalized networking will put me in touch with people with the power to hire me, but this is still a vague concept. Maybe I just need to take a risk by reaching out more aggressively. My fear of rejection is probably holding me back in this area.

As a last resort, I’ve considered expanding my job search geographically. I could begin looking elsewhere for full-time positions, but this requires me to give up the community I’ve established in Chicago. And really, the third largest metropolitan area in the US should be market enough for me to find a job. If I can’t make it here, can I make it anywhere?

So I come back to my original question: how viable of a career is music therapy? For me, the answer is multifaceted. I can’t point to any one source whether it be the economy, the nature of the music therapy field, my training, or (especially) myself. But I only have control over my own issues and try to maintain a positive outlook. I’m dealing with my unemployment by making the best of what I possess and have found (very) part-time work teaching early childhood music classes, a job to which I learned to sell my skill set. There are definitely times I’ve had a bleaker outlook, but as I move forward I feel I’m gaining maturity about the challenges I face and how to deal with them efficiently. There’s been a lot of trial-and-error the last few months, but I refuse to give up yet. Music therapy is worth it.

Update: As of 2012, I have accepted a full-time position that includes benefits!