<p>I can understand your parent’s concern, they look at music, with all its pitfalls, and are afraid if you major in music, that you will come out, not be able to find a living in music, and then have to start over, etc. As others have said, college these days is getting to be seen more and more as vocational training, rather than what it was supposed to be, a higher level of education that would broaden student’s minds and so forth. Even people on here have said things I disagree with, where they compare studying for a BA in music where you have to take core courses in humanities and such to a BM degree and said the BM degree was vocational training…they are different experiences, but I dispute that the core courses you take in college are that much relevant to the work place then having gone through a BM in performance…</p>
<p>The thing to keep in mind is that college degrees in many fields either give you only rudimentary knowledge of the real world, or in many cases, are no better preparation than music would be. Put it this way, you get a degree in English, in history, in the literature of Ancient China, philosophy, political theory, etc, etc, it won’t have in general much relevance to a real job either, in terms of direct knowledge transfer, yet people major in those things, and get jobs in a variety of things. Sure, getting a BA or BS in computer science will make getting a programming job easier, or a BA in engineering into an entry level engineering job is a requisite, but many jobs don’t have that. More importantly, in today’s world many people get grad degrees to go into their chosen profession, so someone with a BM in music could go get an MBA or a masters in computer science (depending on the school), and do something else.</p>
<p>There is another factor here, too, and that is going into something that isn’t your passion. I can just hear parents saying “passion doesn’t put food on the table”, but that isn’t really true. Without passion or at least strong interest, someone taking jobs because ‘they pay well’ often end up not doing well. Lot of kids go into the Ivy league rat-race,wanting to go into investment banking cause that is where the money is, and when they face the reality of it, leave, the attrition rate is high, because to do that you either have a passion for the job, or the passion to make a ton of money, otherwise it tends to burn people out. Go into computer science without having some kind of passion for it, whether it is programming or the business need behind it, and you will probably be another mediocre person putting in their 9-5. </p>
<p>Put it this way, within 5 years of graduating, a lot of students who went to Juilliard are no longer directly in music, and by 10 years, it is a large percentage…but the thing is, miraculously, most of those people go on to do other things, either in the arts (maybe not as a performer) or in other fields. IT has a ton of people who studied music in it, some of them still do music on the side while this is their day job, and while music is their ultimate passion, that passion can drive them forward in their day job, because it supports their passion. </p>
<p>As far as the training itself goes, if you go for a BM degree, it teaches you things most college courses in academia don’t (and believe me, over the years, I have seen a lot of stellar, straight A college students, who had been high ranking SAT/GPA in high school, crash and burn because of that disconnect). Music majors among other things have to be self driven, much more than academic students, because music is a lot more ambiguous. In academics, you take courses, you know when the midterm and final and tests are, you know the projects, when they are due, it is pretty straightforward, and while you need to be disciplined, compare this to music. In music there are no assignments per se, the student is expected to practice (a lot), both individual work and the stuff they are doing in orchestra and chamber and so forth and they have to decide what to practice, how long to practice it and when, which includes trying to find practice rooms, it includes finding the time in a hectic schedule and it amounts to achieving a goal that isn’t all that set in concrete, because with arts being ‘good enough’ may not mean anything, in academics it can mean an A. And guess what? In the real world, in positions of any kind of responsibility other than repetitive, boring tasks, that kind of ambiguity exists, with multiple people needing you to do things, with limited time, evaluating relative priorities, and adjusting efforts to what is going on. </p>
<p>In something like chamber music, you don’t prepare your part right, and the other members of the ensemble fail with you, which is very much like the real world. In college, you write a program, it does what the professor wrote as the objective, you will get a good grade. In the real world, someone will review your code and tell you it is sloppy, QA testers will find all kinds of problems with it, business users will wonder what you wrote cause it isn’t what they want…in music, you get used to that, you practice your tail off, go into your lesson or chamber group, and your head gets taken off for ‘playing it wrong’, your teacher wonders how the heck you got into music school,etc…you learn in music to deal with difficult people, you learn a lot of academic oriented music theory and so forth, and that means a lot.</p>
<p>I can speak as a hiring manager, and people who have studied music are usually pretty highly thought of, because of the discipline required to do it and because people going into it usual do it for passion, rather than ‘to make money’. </p>
<p>I am not saying don’t dual major/dual degree, I am simply saying that the idea that music is only good if you go into the field is not the reality, that it provides a basis for a lot of jobs or futures.</p>
But either way, I know that he had his eyes wide open before he began the journey, and now it’s his to take. I also know that pursuing your passion and then choosing to do something different is better than not having pursued your passion in the first place, and that regret is a useless emotion.</p>