David Bryan is the creator and host of the Curiosity Invited podcast, director of the board of directors of Motorcar Parts of America and board chair of Brave New Films. Among other things he was the founding executive director of The Center for Common Good and for over 18 years was the Co-Founder, President and Head of New Roads School. David earned his law degree and Phd. in Communication from the University at Buffalo.
1) What is your educational background and how did it influence your career path?
For all sorts of reasons – mostly having to do with my father’s climb in his career, we moved around quite a bit when I was growing up. I counted 11 schools by the time I graduated high school. Thinking back, I think they were mostly really good schools whatever that means. My parents cared a lot about my education – probably more than I did – And they had hopes that I would take my education further than they did theirs. When it came time for college, I didn’t really want to go, but I’m not sure I had much imagination about it. I dropped out of college, SUNY Stony Brook, after my first year. I was on the path to enlist in the military and head off to Vietnam. But the men in my family on both sides, basically did an intervention. They had all been in combat in WWI and WWII, and pleaded with me to give school one more chance.
I did not enlist, but took a year off from school. Somehow that year off served me well, and I returned to school with a thirst to learn.In fact, that’s kind of how I chose my major (Social Sciences Interdisciplinary). I wanted to learn everything. But as everyone knows, college demands that we choose majors. I selected the major that required the fewest prescribed classes. That way I could complete my major as quickly as possible and then take all the classes that interested me.
Although my path meandered, that’s probably how I made my way through law school and graduate school. My goal was always to have the space to learn what interested me. That would lead me someplace else… which would lead me someplace else, then someplace else…. At some point, I ended up with a MS in Kinesiology from UCLA, and both a law degree and a PhD degree in Communication (no “s”) from UB. (The path meandered quite a bit, but that’s too long a story to tell here.)
At some point, I figured it was about enough, and so the search to learn took me elsewhere. I moved onto a sailboat. I knew nothing about boats except that they floated. Well… they floated, if you took care of them. I worked in restaurants, in construction, in retail stores, in doctors’ offices. It was quite a potpourri.
By then, what was left of my family had moved to the west coast, and since there was nothing keeping me on the east coast any longer, I moved to LA. I’d really enjoyed teaching as a grad student at UB, and so threw my hat in the ring to be a teacher in the LA area. I became a substitute teacher in LAUSD, and resolved to take the first fulltime job I was offered. That came as a result of a friend of a friend giving my resume to a school he was acquainted with, and I was hired by an exclusive private school in Santa Monica, Crossroads School. Through a variety of twists and turns I ended up co-founding a school, New Roads School (I didn’t pick the name) where I was the Founding Head for nearly 20 years starting. Although I loved it, I eventually asked myself if that was going to be my final “career” move. Turns out that’s a dangerous question for me, and I decided to leave and see if there was indeed a “next.”
The next came in the form of a job lecturing in the Economics Department at UC Santa Cruz. After about eight years there and in response to a huge fire in Northern California, my wife and I ended up moving to Powell, Wyoming, a small town (technically a city) in northwestern Wyoming. But by then I was an educator at heart, and with no jobs available at the local college or middle and high school – besides who’d hire a teacher pushing the end of his career – I started pondering if there was some other next.
That’s when the idea for a podcast popped up. A computer and a bit of tech-upgrade later, I started out on my next learning adventure.
So … how did my educational background influence my career path?… Not sure. You tell me. In some ways it seems like the other way around. My path ended up giving me an educational background. I’m not sure that’s a good way for things to unfold, but it’s worked for me.
2) You have a diverse career of “starting things”, everything from starting a school to starting a podcast? What motivated you to do this work?
I may already have answered this question, but …
Although I never would have predicted it, I loved teaching from the first moment I taught my first class – UB’s Communication 101. I was terrified before it began. I had always been incredibly shy speaking in front of people. Then I cracked my first joke, and students laughed. “Oh boy,” I thought, this might just end up to be fun. By the time that first session of the class was over, I was hooked.
In terms of starting a school, that’s a different story. I taught at Crossroads School in LA for about five years. I enjoyed interacting with young minds, eager to learn. But the private school scene was weird for me. Having grown up a public school kid in the New York area, I had no experience with private schools or the level of economic ease I was surrounded by.
But, my years at Crossroads showed me some of what was possible when teachers were free to create, and classes were small enough so that teachers could really meet different students’ needs with different approaches, often at the same time.
“But who can afford the tuition private schools charge?” I wondered. I had a conversation with the Headmaster of Crossroads to that effect. Happily, he felt the same way, and he being a person with a long track record of making things happen, we started New Roads as a way to open the doors of the advantages of independent education to more families who could not possibly afford ordinary private school tuition.
My most recent adventure, the podcast, Curiosity Invited, was a way of offering “education” when the more institutionalized channels of education were not available.
3) Looking back, what, if anything, do you wish you would have known when you were an undergraduate, law school and PhD student?
I probably knew it in some way… I think we all intuit it early on, but it took a while for it to really sink in. Life paths are always filled with twists and turns. Only the most unlucky people have lives that travel in straight lines. Working with young people you meet a lot of parents who want to ensure that their kids’ lives turn out just so. Of course, when you ask them to look at their own lives, they see immediately that it so rarely happens that way. Unless someone is very unlucky, life throws curve balls. Some are scary, sometimes tragic; some are wonderful. But all are unexpected. So what do I wish I’d known? I suppose that the best we can do is get better at discerning which curves to swing at. (By the way, I’m really not a baseball fan.)
4) What organizations, clubs or internships were you involved in during college? How did those experiences help prepare you for your current roles?
Actually, this question relates to the previous question. Looking back, I was not particularly involved with organizations, clubs or internships when I was in college and grad school. And perhaps that is something I wish I’d have known back in school… to try those out. Since school days I’ve spent a good portion of my life saying “Yes, I’ll try that” – to opportunities, challenges, things that come along. I wish I’d have seen the value of that earlier.
5) What are the biggest challenges that you typically face in your career?
Hmmm… I need to think about this one in two parts
a. I think the biggest challenge I’ve faced early on has to do with courage… mine that is. Too often over the years I responded to new things by running away from things that made me afraid… afraid I would fail. In hindsight, I allowed so many opportunities to come and go because I feared that I would fail. I wish I had learned that fear is fine, but, except when fears are realistic, the best attitude toward them is to acknowledge them and go forward anyway.
b.The challenges within my career had to do finding the sweet spot between learning how others do things and “making something your own.” Formulaic approaches to things are fine – here’s how to structure a classroom “lesson,” here’s how to raise money, here’s how to sail (yeah, a boat). These are the “best practices.” Good stuff to know. But my success – and I think this is almost always true for most people – came when I dared to make something my own, to do xyz as me, rather than simply repeating what came before.
6) What advice do you have for anyone that would want to pursue a career in education, entertainment (being a board member of a film company) or “podcasting”.
Not sure I have “advice” about any of these per se. My “advice” is to listen to what makes your heart sing and do your best to do that. Of course, you may have to do this or that to survive, to pay the bills, to take care of your responsibilities and commitments. But if there is any way to keep that “heart song” alive … or at least still on your radar … that’s important.
7) If a UB student wanted to talk with you, what is the best way to reach you?
LinkedIn works.
NOTE: if you are a UB student or alumnus who would like to connect with others to give or get career insights you can join Connect-a-Bull. Interested in sharing your career story with UB students by answering questions like David Bryan? Email Ed Brodka, UB Career Design Consultant, at brodka@buffalo.edu.
