Moving from the Design and Creative Industries into academia has felt like a leap — but three months into my PhD, I’m starting to see just how familiar the process actually is. 🎭 Hamilton, Tick, Tick… Boom!, and Rent have been very surprisingly helpful through this journey. Over the holidays, I watched Hamilton on the West End and rewatched Tick, Tick… Boom!. I couldn’t stop noticing similarities in the quest for “the” creation — and then this video essay on Sondheim and Larson came up on my YouTube feed.
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A few things that caught my attention on how creatives build a body of work and how academia operates:
1️⃣ Mentoring
Stephen Sondheim (A Sunday in the Park with George, Company, West Side Story) was mentored by Oscar Hammerstein (The Sound of Music, The King and I). In Tick, Tick… Boom!, Jonathan Larson (Rent) finds a mentor in Sondheim — who pushed and supported him throughout his failures and workshops. My PhD journey has felt similar: questions, pushes, pulls, and conversations with supervisors and peers have helped me move forward, even when the path feels unclear. I just need a few of those who came before me to show that there’s a light…somewhere.
2️⃣ Revision
Musicals are tinkered, workshopped, and refined before hitting Broadway.
Fashion collections go from 50 sketches → 30 samples → 15–20 finished pieces. A PhD as I’ve been learning lately is quite similar: proposal → redesign questions → conference papers and abstracts → continuous feedback.
Reflexivity in motion — thinking about thinking while thinking. Thats both a creative and academic for me? (And somehow reminded me of sociology readings of Bourdieu and Giddens!)
3️⃣ Communities & Cross-Pollination
The video essay talks about Larson being inspired by Orwell and the opera La Bohème. Who would have thought this could become Rent, a rock opera set in New York about AIDS, love, and not paying rent? A fashion collection might involve a mood board that includes Victorian mourning wear, Shigeru Umebayashi’s score for In the Mood for Love, and Schindler’s List. Weird? Well, those have been the best-selling collections with the best reviews.
It’s creativity in a different form. At the same time, to break through, you need to work within the existing box — understanding what top journals will accept and what they won’t. For creatives, it’s about what is novel yet scalable and fundable. It’s about understanding the boundaries and learning how to play at the peripheries. It’s about taking a wide range of information and readings to create something out of nothing.
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The parallels between creativity and research are striking—and comforting. Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation has been one of my favorite readings this year, reminding me that both academia and creative work are vocations in their own right.