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Bill White - Episode 33
169 Plays10 years ago
Profiles in CRM features short interviews with CRM professionals from all experience levels and educational levels. I ask a standard list of questions and see how each person answers them based on their experience
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to CRM Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to the archaeology podcast network. This is Bill White and you're listening to Profiles in CRM.
Host and Format Overview
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Profiles in CRM, Episode 34. Here's your host, Chris Webster.
00:00:16
Speaker
Hey, thanks for the intro,
Anonymity in CRM
00:00:18
Speaker
Siri. Profiles and CRM ask CRM professionals eight simple questions. The answers vary wildly depending on their experience and education. Because of the nature of contract archaeology and how small this field really is, some people choose not to reveal their name or the company they work for. Stay to the end of the show to hear how you can have a chance to answer these same questions.
Introduction to Bill White
00:00:36
Speaker
All right, we're here on Profiles and here's the first question. What's your name and who do you work for?
00:00:40
Speaker
My name is Bill White, and right now I work for the Bureau of Applied Research and Anthropology. It's like a sub-department of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Oh, I honestly thought you were going to say you work for a succinct research. Oh, I also do that too. Nice, nice. There aren't really show notes for this podcast, so check out succinctresearch.com to see more from Bill. Yes. All right.
Bill White's CRM Experience
00:01:06
Speaker
All right. So how long have you been working in CRM?
00:01:09
Speaker
Oh, more than 10 years. And we think I got my, uh, I got my master's in 2004, but I started like the first semester. So like 11 years. Nice. Nice. So what, uh, you know, nowadays, what is the position you usually have on CRM projects and what is the highest position you've ever held? Oh, the position I almost always have now is, um, either field director or, um, project manager depends. Mm-hmm.
00:01:39
Speaker
But this last summer, I was the principal investigator for the River Street archeology project. So I've been a PI.
00:01:47
Speaker
Excellent. Excellent. And where have you worked? When I was in college, my first job was on the Clearwater River in Idaho. And then after that, I did my master's research in Illinois. And then I worked the next year teaching field schools in Virginia and Fredericksburg.
00:02:11
Speaker
And then I worked for about three years in Washington, so all over Washington state. And then after that, I worked for a pretty big company here in Arizona. So I got to work in California, Nevada. I think that might actually have been it. Oh, New Mexico. And then another company that worked in another company here in Arizona that I pretty much did work in Arizona for them.
00:02:38
Speaker
And then as a grad student here at the University of Arizona, I've worked in Montana and North Dakota. Okay. Awesome. All right. Now here's the, uh, those are sort of the setup questions here. The fun questions.
Achieving Dreams in Archaeology
00:02:51
Speaker
Well, fun ish. Um, what's, what is the best thing that's happened to you that's related to being an archeologist and it doesn't have to be professional. It could be something personal or, you know, whatever. Ooh, that's a good question. What's the best thing that's happened to me because I became an archeologist.
00:03:08
Speaker
Hmm. You know, so for me being an archaeologist was always what I wanted to do ever since I was a kid.
00:03:20
Speaker
So it's kind of like I achieved my goal, but there's always a danger with that because once you've achieved one goal, then there's another goal. So being a field tech, you've become an archeologist, but now you have another goal. And that could be either you don't like archeology and you want to become something else, or you can be like me and just get like, you know, double down and just keep doubling down. And so, you know, I wanted to be a crew chief, then I wanted to be a project director and a field director and principal investigator.
00:03:49
Speaker
And so, you know, there's never an end to the goals that you want. But the most interesting thing that's happened to me is just the fact that I could realize a dream like that across my entire life. You know, it was more than a decade from the time I decided I wanted to be an archaeologist before I actually ever took an archaeology course. Wow. And it was like, you know, almost 20 years before I actually got paid to do archaeology.
00:04:15
Speaker
So to stick with something like that, it's actually kind of amazing to see that I can actually dream something up one day and then stay with it so long that it actually becomes a reality. That's awesome. That's sticking to it. I think a number of us in this field probably have a somewhat similar story, just wanting to be an archaeologist when we were younger and then finding some way to make it work and doing a whole bunch of stuff along the way.
00:04:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I took a jobs workshop at the SAA last year in 2014. And Carol Alec and Joe Watkins were the instructors for the course. And they had us all right down. So there was like, it was sold out, there was probably 25 people in there and they had you
00:04:55
Speaker
write down when, how old you were when you decided that you wanted to become an archaeologist on one piece of paper and then put it on a post-it note up at the front of the room and then write on another piece of paper what year it was that you actually first got your first chance to do archaeology. So either a field school or a volunteer thing or something like that and it was like
00:05:19
Speaker
you know, on the left hand, where the ages that we all wanted to be, six, seven, eight, five years old, four years old, and then the year that we actually got to do archaeology, you know, 16, 18, 22, 23. So almost everyone who actually wants to become an archaeologist, you have to stick with this thing for a long, long time.
00:05:39
Speaker
That's awesome. I would almost have to have two different years. Like there's the year when you're like, you know, you first see Indiana Jones. Like for me, it would have been like eight, you know, seven, eight years old. Oh, that'd be cool. I'd like to be an archeologist. And so there's that year, but then there's the year.
00:05:55
Speaker
In my late twenties, early thirties in college when I was like, Oh, you can actually do this as a career without being a professor. And that, that was kind of a different realization where it's not just one of those, like, I want to be an astronaut sort of thing. You know, it's like, Hey, this might actually happen.
Improving CRM Education and Business
00:06:11
Speaker
Well, that's pretty crazy. Astronaut was my fallback career. Yeah, me too. I'm too tall, so I just bailed. Once I found out that I was too tall to be an astronaut, I was like, well, I'm never doing math again. Never doing math again. Mine was astronaut, archaeologist, and commercial pilot. I got my pilot's license, but I was never a commercial pilot, but I still consider that two out of three.
00:06:36
Speaker
Well, if you make enough money, you can always take Virgin Galactic like I plan on doing, and then you just accomplish all your dreams in one lifetime. That is pretty much where my savings are all going right now. I don't know what you're going to do when you get reincarnated. Yeah, we'll find out. Emperor of the universe. Okay, we'll start on that one. Yeah, that's my goal. All right. So what is the biggest thing that you would change that would make being a CRM archaeologist better? Oh, man, the biggest thing that I would change
00:07:02
Speaker
Hmm, that's a tough one. You know, there's two things that I would change. I would change the way that we get educated in school so that it is more rigorous and more similar to what you're actually going to do when you go into cultural resources.
00:07:22
Speaker
And then on the cultural resources side, I would try to I would try to focus ways for cultural resources companies to expand beyond cultural resources to the full Monty of heritage conservation. So we're talking
00:07:38
Speaker
planning, real estate development, advising online courses, like I mean the full Monty, because cultural resources companies, the main problem with being a cultural resources archaeologist, they say it's feast or famine, but it actually is
00:07:55
Speaker
is not properly capitalizing a company and diversifying income streams to the point where no matter what happens you've got money coming in from multiple different you've got assets you've got additional side revenue ventures and you've got you know
00:08:12
Speaker
just basically a plethora of ways that you can raise money when you need it. And then on the education side, I wouldn't spend a lot of time telling people, oh, you really shouldn't go into archaeology, you know, there's no money in archaeology, because everybody who wants to be an archaeologist, they don't, they don't care if there's money or not, they want to actually just achieve their goal. So telling them there's no money will still walk like lemmings towards the cliff.
00:08:37
Speaker
The better way is to make it a grinder, you know, like Navy Seal Camp, where you have to actually do physical challenges and research, raise money, bring projects to fruition. And if you can't do that, then maybe you might want to start thinking about what you're going to do, you know. So I think that that's kind of the problem in general with anthro departments all over the world, well, at least the United States.
00:09:03
Speaker
They focus, they say they focus on research but they actually in fact don't. They really focus on getting students in and out the door because that brings in revenue. And then they say that they're giving you an education when in fact they're really necessarily not.
00:09:20
Speaker
or they're giving you the kind of education that's not really gonna help you.
Diversifying CRM Services
00:09:23
Speaker
If the goal is to create every grad student or PhD into a professor, then the minute they walk in, they need to start publishing articles, right? They need to become major authors that bring in big grants and grind through the arduous task of, you know, publishing, you know, five or six journal articles and a book before you graduate, right? But they're not necessarily doing that, they're having you
00:09:46
Speaker
spend time on papers and take this core curriculum and all this other stuff, you know, they're not necessarily creating professors, but they're also not creating cultural resources, archaeologists, and there's most departments, there's a big disconnect between the Gen Xers and Baby Boomers who actually made it and became archaeology professors, and us, you know, Gen Xers and late Gen Xers and Millennials that are trying to finish school. So
00:10:15
Speaker
The people who came in, that was 20 years ago that you became a professor. It was 20 years ago, there was like 100 million fewer people in the United States. Your generation was pretty big, but the millennials are even bigger. The situation of funding in universities was a lot better and more stable in the 80s and 90s than it is today. So it's like two completely different worlds and they're not necessarily doing what they're supposed to for their students.
00:10:44
Speaker
So I'd aim on education, you know, and then I'd also focus on companies giving them the skills that they need to expand their operation to create residual income or passive income in order to keep themselves alive.
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah, those are two really good points because there's plenty of grad school programs out there nowadays where you can focus on CRM, but there's almost nothing for the undergrads and they're still focusing on a basic generic anthropology degree without a focus on CRM. I know those programs are out there for CRM, but there's just not very many of them. So that's a really good point. And then the diversifying for cultural resource companies. I don't know how it's taken so long to come to that realization, just watching companies fall by the wayside because they don't have any projects and no other source of income.
00:11:32
Speaker
Yeah, and you know, what's they become prey for the other companies that are diversified. So like, yeah, engineering companies realize that they could also do architecture, then they realize, you know, hey, well, we can become full service providers. So then they started getting biologists and, and people who can do the the NEPA for hazardous wastes, I can't remember what that's called. But
00:11:53
Speaker
do all those things and then they get archaeologists and they're like oh sweet well here's this archaeology firm that's pretty much out of money let's just buy that you know and so that's that's what's happening and you know that ch2m hill and those companies didn't start off like you know oh well i'm just going to design one bridge and then you know i'm pretty good with that
00:12:11
Speaker
Oh, they decided they were going to do bridges and do engineering. And then they decided they'll do construction. Then they decided they'll do this other stuff and project management. And then they're like, sweet, we can make money in this environmental compliance. Let's get some companies that do that. And so, you know, that's what they did.
Bill White's Career Aspirations
00:12:26
Speaker
But cultural resources companies usually start like, you know, cultural resources, and then they just like, stay that way for a long time and try to dominate a niche.
00:12:35
Speaker
until all the projects fall apart and they can't get alone to keep anything alive and it doesn't quite work out for them. All right, so you've been pretty much every position in a CRM department. You've done pretty much all of it and now you're in a PhD program and you're getting close to wrapping that up. So this next question is, what is your career goal in CRM? And I'll follow that up with, is your career goal even lie in CRM?
00:13:00
Speaker
Well, yeah, no, it does. Like I said, the two things that I'd like to change, I basically am going to do. So if everything works out well, and I can get through the grinder of the job market and maybe become a professor, I don't want to become just your average, well, I'll take that back.
00:13:24
Speaker
All the professors I've had in anthropology have been really awesome and they've focused on their niche of archaeology or anthropology and they are really good at it. And the lady who is my advisor now is probably one of the best I've ever seen at, you know, getting people jobs, helping communities. I mean, these people are actually doing it, right?
00:13:44
Speaker
But I cannot say that of every PhD that I've ever met in cultural resources. And it's not because, like, the very best get chosen to be a professor, and then the rest of the PhDs just have to do CRM. It's more like, if you're lucky and they need a Mesoamerican alternative lifestyle woman archaeologist in their department, then they're going to hire you. Like, that's literally what it boils down to.
00:14:12
Speaker
It doesn't boil down to how good you are, how smart you are, how many NSF grants or any of that other stuff. It matters on like, are you the exact perfect individual to beat out all the 180 or 400 other applicants for this job? So I'm not delusional when I think that I'll become a professor. However, there's nothing that prevents me from teaching cultural resource management. I mean, the succinct research blog, that's what I aim to do, you know, give people information they can use in their career.
00:14:41
Speaker
If I don't work for a university, then I'll just do succinct research. And I want to either be that diversifying element in either an existing cultural resources company or just start doing cultural resources projects myself and then diversify. And like the first thing and probably the easiest thing to do is
00:15:04
Speaker
take your report, don't put the site locations in it and write your conclusions and your introduction as if it's a book and then make that a book that's available. Like that's the easiest way that you can bring in, you know, a couple of dollars off of the reports that you're already writing that are going to go in that Indiana Jones vault. Like that's the first thing. The second thing is to become the preferred vendor of several companies or agencies or organizations and embed yourself in a community so that
00:15:32
Speaker
you know, whenever there's any kind of chance for historic preservation, they just kind of like look to you. And so a lot of that is doing a lot of free archaeology, public archaeology or helping districts create their nomination forms and stuff like that until you get to the point where people just recommend you in a community. And now Tucson, that's going to be hard. It's a pretty big place with a lot of archaeologists.
00:15:55
Speaker
But Tucson is not normal as far as cultural resources. There's a lot of other places and states out there that don't have anyone that's trying to do that. So as far as the future goes, get the PhD. You know, I just got to get out of school and then either teach cultural resource management and partner with cultural resources companies or partner with cultural resources companies to diversify their income streams.
Supporting Archaeology Careers
00:16:23
Speaker
OK. And I'd like to end on this last question. But before that, I'm going to ask you a different question. Where can people go on the web to find out more about what you're doing? I think we mentioned your website already. You've got some other outlets like Twitter and things like that.
00:16:39
Speaker
Yeah, the easiest way to get ahold of me is at succinct research. So it's S U C C I N C T R E S E A R C H research. It's all one word calm. And there's a blog there. There's a whole bunch of other stuff. I mean, one of my the reason I started the blog is because it seemed like, you know, during the recession, everybody needed to find a job.
00:17:02
Speaker
And I guess when I first graduated, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get a job. So then when I got laid off, it wasn't as hard for me to find one, but I was surprised that a whole bunch of other archaeologists didn't actually have these skills on how to find a job and stuff.
00:17:19
Speaker
I really started the blog as far as that and I started writing ebooks to try and help people get jobs or get better in their jobs. And then I realized there was actually a decent sized audience. And so, you know, the blogs kept going and I keep doing stuff through succinct research. But that's the easiest way to figure out what I'm doing. And then I'm on Twitter is succinct bill. And I think I'm on Instagram too is succinct bill.
00:17:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. All right. So here's the last question.
Life Goals and Archaeology
00:17:48
Speaker
If you could give an undergrad thinking about a career in CRM, one piece of advice, what would it be? The piece of advice I always give every undergrad who asked me if they, you know, what it's like to be an archeologist is I just say,
00:18:01
Speaker
Take a few minutes in a piece of paper and sit down and write down what you want out of your life. What do you want your life to be? Think about your ideal day when you're 25, when you're 35, and when you're 45, and just write that out like,
00:18:20
Speaker
I wake up in the morning around this time I've got a cat and I've got a pet bird and then I watch the news and I eat breakfast and I ride my bike through a city and try to dial it down to there's trees along my path and there's only luxury cars on the road and I live in a townhouse and every morning I wake up and look out over whatever bay.
00:18:46
Speaker
those are the kind of things that that like those are your dreams basically that are the way you want your life to be and you know they're just imagination so don't don't hold back if you really want to wake up in the morning and you know hop in a velvet robe and have you know lions roaring on each side of your massive bed then and walk across the marble floor on rose petals like seriously write that down i mean is that is that what's going to really make you happy
00:19:14
Speaker
or is it going to make you happy to you know your house doesn't matter so much you've got just got a few possessions you've got some close friends you don't really need a husband you know kids aren't that important what you really want to do is just help people or you know do something else okay so think about all those things think about what you want them to be in those three decades because those are really like the formative
00:19:35
Speaker
all of your childhood led up to your 20s, 30s, and 40s, and all of the rest of your life after that is because of what you did in your 20s and 30s and 40s. So like think about that, and then come back to me and ask, tell me what your ideal day was like, tell me those days, tell me where you live, tell me what you, you know, what you wanted, and then I can tell you whether archaeology is for you or not.
00:19:59
Speaker
Because I mean, there is there is really no, I know, archaeology company owners that have vacation homes, that literally like, I mean, they don't necessarily have private jets, but they fly all around the world going to conferences, they do projects in other countries, you know, they're millionaires, basically, they have more than one house, you know, in town.
Career Reflections and Closing Notes
00:20:18
Speaker
I don't know if those guys necessarily thought that they would be millionaires doing cultural resources or anything like that, but they ended up that way. And I also know a lot of people who got a bachelor's and they spent five years pulling ticks out of their ears in some swamp some year and living in crummy hotels. And they just spend their entire day crying about how
00:20:41
Speaker
they always wanted to do archaeology and this is an archaeology and it's totally horrible and they hate their life and they hate school and they hate their professors and they hate everybody and that's how they live and for years and years and years until they can no longer dig they spend their whole life hating you know what they do and they never one time thought about the fact that they didn't really they don't have to do that they could have done something else they could have done several different things in their lives that they didn't have to uh you know work in a swamp land somewhere
00:21:10
Speaker
getting paid minimum wage. So like the my best advice is to write down those dreams and think about those because the simple fact of writing those down, it helps you remember what your main goal is like, if you want to be a mom, and that's your main goal, then you know that that's something that really
00:21:30
Speaker
can really anchor you in reality, but if you just want to be a vagabond and just work on sites all over the place and just hang out with cool people, you know, hey, that's totally possible too. You can be a millionaire, a mom, and a traveling vagabond doing archaeology. It's really up to you.
00:21:51
Speaker
Show notes for this and all episodes can be found on the Archaeology Podcast Network website at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/. At that page you'll also find a form that you can fill out so you can be interviewed on the show. Interviews take less than 30 minutes and you don't need any special equipment. Thanks for listening and I'll see you in the field.
00:22:13
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com