What You're Doing With Your Degree?

[CaptJoshGrizzly]

I've seen a lot of these college threads and with good reason. Good to see people take college seriously. I'm a 19 year old freshman attending Fullerton College, with the intentions of being a music major. I'd like to teach music in a college one day, but being in a band that's always moving forward is really all I'm after, in life.

so if you have attained your degree in music, please share your experiences and present status.

P.S. (this thread is about you, not me)
i respect anyone who decides/decided to pursue music, but for this thread don't lecture me about my aspiration to one day 'make-it-big' because to me, this deals more with my social ability rather than knowledge of music. a whole different subject.

[braydensharrar]

I will let you know after I earn it! I am a Film Scoring major at Berklee. So hopefully I will use my degree to land those types of gigs.

Good luck in your musical studies!

~B

[David1234]

Well, I spend a lot more time on talkbass now that I'm a music graduate.

[MalcolmAmos]

I finished my degree - BS in Business Administration 27 years after my freshman year. Reason - I had hit that "glass ceiling" and the jobs above that ceiling were not available to anyone with out a four year degree.

Did not really matter what my degree was in, but, with out it I had reached as far as I could go. That is the point of my post.

Several of our friends children went the music degree route. One at Berkley the other at SMU. One has a PhD and is teaching in a small university. The other is a high school band director. Both seem to be very happy. Just remembered, one other friend's Son is a Junior this year he too wants to pursue a PhD.

[pasta4lnch]

I graduated from Berklee w/ a film scoring/music synth degree '99 I'm still in the biz, though barley these days. I write music for TV, play in bands, and have a small studio I produce artists in . . . for a while, before the economy tanked, I was really happy. I wasn't breaking the bank but I was making enough to live - it was a dream come true and there was NO better feeling. . .

well there was one - falling in love and getting married. now w/ the prospect of having a kid w/ a dwindling job in a dead industry there's a whole new feeling. PANIC!

good luck - for as much as I wanna tell you to RUN to another career, I can't imagine what I would of felt had I not gave it a go!!

[Ric5]

I went to Berkeley ... as in University of California Berkeley ... my degree is in Architecture. I have been working in that field since 1986.

[smeet]

Went to Berklee for three semesters as a violin performance major. Got disillusioned with the prospect of making a living as a musician and went back to engineering school, got my PhD in computer science. I've worked in the film special effects industry for the past 16 years.

If I had stayed in music as a career, it would have been much harder to support my family and buy a house. I play a lot of music, but I still sometimes wonder what if...

[gttim]

I was working on a Bachelor of Media Production and noticed classmates were earning the degree and then struggling. Some were selling cars. One guys was working at CNN Headline News during the day and then at Turtle Records at night to pay rent. The people who concentrated on audio recording seemed to fair the worst. The high point came when I was working at a restaurant where six (6) people working there had a similar degree. One young girl was just starting to working on that degree and we were all trying to talk her out of it, but she was going to be famous. I bailed in my senior year and got a math degree instead. Best choice I ever made, well except for that night I agreed to go out drinking with Salma Hayek.

I always advise people to work on degrees that have a clear and accessible career path. My sister got a BS in Nursing and can work anywhere and anytime she wants. Accountants are usually in demand. Math/Actuary is good if you don't mind studying. I am sure people can suggest others.

Journalism/Media, 4 year business degrees, Psychology, Music, Art, English, History and stuff are not the best options, usually. It is hard to find work, and teaching jobs in those fields are drying up. There are exceptions, of course, but every time I hear about a co-worker's kid studying journalism, I want to slap them around a little bit.

Major in something you can make a good living at and minor in what you want to do. Example, rather than get a Journalism Degree, get a science degree that you can use to work and then a journalism minor. Then it will be much easier for you to break into writing about science issues than if you just had a journalism degree, and you can eat while trying.

[Chris K]

One of my uncles who was solo clarinet with the Band of the Royal Dutch Marines (and always claiming they were the best military band in the world) advised me to NOT study music, since I had quite a few career options. Keep it as a hobby, he said. So I studied history way back in the 70's and earned my living gigging with party bands. I became a history teacher but decided to study music on the side and got me a music degree in the 80's, that I never used professionally.

I'm pretty happy with my choices, because I can play whatever music I want, whenever I want, whichever instrument I like (there have been quite a few) and compose or arrange what I like.

I don't envy young guys thaty study music but never reach their goals and end up playing what others order them to play, or teach lazy and untalented dudes.

[MonetBass]

My first degree is in Business Admin (Mgmt Info Sys). After working a little over a year as a programmer, I quit that and started an MBA. After realizing I had no desire to finish that, I did a complete U-turn and got a music degree, with the intention of going all the way through a PhD and teaching. That didn't pan out, so I moved and got a job in IT (first field once again) and have been with the same company for 12 years now. Do I regret the music degree? No way. I made some great friends and learned more in three years than I ever would have studying on my own. I still compose, arrange, and record at home.

Many of my friends from music school, who were pursuing Music Education degrees, are no longer in that field. I imagine a lot of it has to do with the school systems here in Oklahoma not supporting music & arts, and teachers in general, in the schools (sadly).

[rmkesler]

I have a degree in music and taught in the public schools for three years. The program I was in was pretty challenging schedule wise as the music classes were two and three hour credits. So to get a 15+ hour class load you had to take six or seven classes per quarter/semester. More if you needed to over load your classes. My father used to joke about how my report cards came in two separate envelopes because I took so many classes. The great thing was the amount of time I spent playing in different groups and in private lessons. The experience will certainly take your playing to a new level.

I'm now a manager for a small software company and play in my spare time.

[alfaBAT9]

I got myself a B.Des in '05 and have been working at an agency doing web design ever since, plus a tiny bit of freelancing for print on the side. I started a band 4 years ago and we got pretty far considering that we never signed to a label. Just to give you an idea of what "pretty far" means – we're from a small city in Canada and we opened for some pretty huge bands, played all the major music festivals in Canada, and did CMW in NYC last year. I bid them farewell and wished them luck last week. The business side of things started taking over the fun side, plus there were some personal issues in there too. I've realized after 4 years that making music is so much about the people you play with. No matter how good the music is, if the chemistry is wrong it's not going to last.

[DizzyExiled]

Associates and the better part of my Bachelors in Psychology, Geography, Anthropology and Behaviorial Science.

Work in a power plant.