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insights you probably already had
Back in Atlanta!
So Lindsey and I were walking back from the CS building at IU, talking about the music department. And I realized something that had previously eluded me: there's a whole lot at stake at a music school. Winning means being able to support yourself by doing what you love -- but a whole lot of people are not going to be able to make a living performing. How many people are out there with music degrees? What sorts of jobs do they have now? [0] [1]
People who want to be engineers are super-lucky. You can, for instance, be a pretty mediocre programmer and still make a living writing code.
There are so many interesting things to think about. One of Lindsey's friends from the choir (which is almost all music students) is looking into humor in Victorian literature; her boyfriend is working on the history of matrices -- they predate Gauss, apparently, but just by a little.
[0] We need a tool where you can ask this kind of question and visualize the answers. Is this stuff in the census? ...
[1] Also, this is not to say that being a performer is the only "success" case for somebody with a music degree.
So Lindsey and I were walking back from the CS building at IU, talking about the music department. And I realized something that had previously eluded me: there's a whole lot at stake at a music school. Winning means being able to support yourself by doing what you love -- but a whole lot of people are not going to be able to make a living performing. How many people are out there with music degrees? What sorts of jobs do they have now? [0] [1]
People who want to be engineers are super-lucky. You can, for instance, be a pretty mediocre programmer and still make a living writing code.
There are so many interesting things to think about. One of Lindsey's friends from the choir (which is almost all music students) is looking into humor in Victorian literature; her boyfriend is working on the history of matrices -- they predate Gauss, apparently, but just by a little.
[0] We need a tool where you can ask this kind of question and visualize the answers. Is this stuff in the census? ...
[1] Also, this is not to say that being a performer is the only "success" case for somebody with a music degree.
no subject
Yeah. At my undergraduate school, which was a little liberal arts school in the sticks, I don't think most of the music majors really intended performing careers. A B.A. in music just seemed like the most fun major.
The music school at the university where I am now, though, has a lot of students pursuing degrees specifically designed to prepare them for a career in performance. I think the school knows that a lot of those people will end up doing other things to supplement their income (teaching, most likely), and they try to prepare them for that, too, more or less, depending on the program.