insights you probably already had

[alexr_rwx]

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.

Comments

[billings.livejournal.com]

It was really nice programming after trying to make music. Nobody asks you to make music, you are rewarded infrequently for it, and rarely if ever monetarily. I'm probably not cut out for it as a profession. The positive feedback at a real job did wonders for me.