Considering NOT doing band (or other musical activities) in college? READ THIS--- From Abby Carlson-- To all my musically-inclined high school senior friends who are in the midst of college thinkings (some of you might want to be music majors; thats great. This is addressed more to those of you who dont want to do that): You may plan on being a biology major, maybe engineering, maybe psychology, maybe Spanish. You may be thinking about your major requirements, your hard classes, your labs. Youre starting to worry about all the time its going to take to figure out whats going on in your lectures, do the homework, study for exams, exercise, eat healthy, get enough sleep, and maybe even make some friends and have a little fun. Some of you may have even thought to yourself, Im going to need to cut X out of my schedule to have enough time for school. Or maybe someone else said it to you. Some of you may have replaced that X with band, orchestra, choir, or color guard. If I can impart on you one little piece of advice for the coming year: dont cut it out. But marching band is such a time commitment! you exclaim. Ive no room in my schedule to keep up with my singing! Theres no way Ill have time to finish all my chem homework if I have given my weekends over to guard! All bullshit. There is enough time. It is entirely possible; it is completely do-able. Marching band does not take up every spare minute, orchestra does not require a thousand hours a week, and you will have free time. You will get your work done, and done properly. You will have enough time to eat, sleep, bathe, do laundry, and hang out with friends. It may be a little tricky, it may even be difficult, but all it requires of you is a bit of responsibility and time management. I personally had plenty of time between symphonic band rehearsals, marching band practices, and football games to do all my homework. I know plenty of people, people who had much more difficult schedules than I did, who also succeeded. We had free time. Additionally, the band administration understood that we are at college to learn, and if we had some problem like an exam that overlapped with practice, it was ok. So dont worry about it! As a side note, dont think youll be alone if you arent a music major. Dont think that, because youre an engineer, youll have so little time that you wont be able to keep up. As a matter of fact, there is a ridiculously large percentage of people in marching band (my area of expertise) that are non-majors. To be fair, there are plenty of performance majors, music ed majors, composition majors, and the like, but, according to my bands website, over 80% of the band arent music majors. We probably have someone from every single major out there. So dont worry, plenty of people have been where you will be and they survived. You can probably even ask them for homework help! As you can see, I definitely dont encourage dropping your musical group because you think you wont have time. In fact, I very highly recommend keeping up with it! It. is. so. much. fun! I personally had the time of my life during the marching season. I met most of my friends in the band and had an absolute blast with them; it was even more fun than in high school. I dont regret a minute of the time Ive spent with my trumpet family, I dont regret waking up early on Saturday mornings to go to a football game, and I dont regret the great feeling that comes from knowing Im in an amazing program with an amazing staff and amazing kids. I know that I definitely would have regretted not doing band if Id decided to cut it out of my life. I think Ive gone on for long enough. Summary for those of you who didnt quite make it through: Do band. Do orchestra, do color guard, do choir, do jazz band! There IS enough time to get all your work done, and you WILL have the greatest time of your life. And anyway, if youve kept up with it this long, why stop?
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 23:30:47 +0000