Wednesday, November 21, 2007

The Seven Year Itch

I came home yesterday to an email from the esteemed American Musicological Society. It informed me, in language that implied only the slightest hint of judgment, that student membership in the AMS is only allowed for seven years. My seven years are now apparently up.
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6 comments:

KG said...

Ouch! I guess the AMS doesn't want undergraduate members. (For the record, I received a similar email from another important music society and thus joined as a non-student member.)

1:16 PM
Sammee said...

Only seven years! That is ridiculous. I've been a member since I was a senior undergraduate... I guess my membership will expire soon, too. I bet my salary won't go up very much! =P

8:23 AM
PMG said...

exactly--I haven't been in graduate school that long, it's just that I joined as an undergraduate.

Oh well. It reminds me of the ticket pricing at a local concert series here in Philly. They offer student tickets, but only to "students under the age of 30." That's still me, but I have plenty of colleagues who are over 30, and they are definitely still broke!

10:05 AM
Sammee said...

I guess this is to prevent people who work full-time jobs and are part-time students from getting discounts on movie tickets or concert tickets or memberships to academic societies. I still think it is a bit stingy, though. I'm sure they aren't losing THAT much money. I'm glad that the NYC Met allows students to purchase two tickets at a time for each opera!

P.S. I wrote a bit about the whole academic guilt complex in my blog...

12:55 PM
Rebecca M said...

Ah yes. I experienced this last year with AMS. (Of course I did join as a graduate student, so...). There needs to be a low-income category for those of us who may have surpassed the seven years, or are no longer students but didn't land that high-paying job the minute the dissertation was filed.

9:27 AM
Sammee said...

I am becoming a bit of a self-proclaimed 'conference whore', and I was recently investigating the rates for joining SEM. They have a scaling system for their membership rates, so that you pay less or more depending on your income bracket.

http://webdb.iu.edu/sem/scripts/membership/benefitsrates.cfm

10:18 PM

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