Congratulations @sbjdorlo and here’s to hoping you can get his scholarship reinstated.
Congratulations to all the families whose children are completing their college journey’s with graduations. It’s such an exciting time.
Congratulations to your D on the recognition and money, @mperrine! Sounds like your D has been rockin’ it!!
My son got an email today from Concordia University Irvine notifying him that he got a $17,000 a year music scholarship! He sent in a video audition last weekend because we had to cancel the audition at the last minute. I’m glad they still give scholarships for video auditions. Don’t know if it’s affordable yet as the other financial aid hasn’t been released, but it feels good anyway. 
That’s huge @sbjdorlo ! Congrats! Wow, such good news!
Fantastic news @sbjdorlo!!! Congrats to you and your son.
While we are waiting, waiting, waiting, it is so exciting to hear about people’s audition trips and results! Good luck to everyone who is heading out this week for a last round of auditions!
agh Northwestern portal STILL has red awaiting X next to Music Audition… makes me so anxious. Everyone else the same? Should I call the admissions office?
@thefirebird - Yes! Call them. If it stresses you, reduce the stress.
@sbjdorlo - congrats on the $$. Wowser! That will be hard to turn down. We just found out (I’m a little slow that for the California one, you have to have lived in CA for 3 years! We lived with our kids here in CA for 10 years, then SC for 6 years, and then back here for 2 year so no dice. 3 years seems like a long time for residency requirement. Yikes.
@mperrine - sounds like a really fruitful few days! I have to agree with you about NEC. They are very stiff and formal. Our daughter did her audition (took maybe 15 minutes or so) and that was it. Not chit chat, no interview, not anything else really. I wonder how they can make an admissions decision? An interview at the very least would seem to be in order. Just seems strange to me. And I felt like it was an expensive and long trip from the West Coast for 15 minutes. Good luck at Bard. We met a jazz vocalist at SFCM this weekend who is auditioning there.
The end is in sight everyone!!! Our daughter gets on a red eye flight tomorrow night. Not sure if she was going to make it (her neck hurts from excessive practicing) - but she seems to be better today - so away she goes. If anyone sees her at the New School this weekend please tell her to break a leg and her mom said to have fun. (there aren’t many female bassists out there so she’s easy to spot). Wish I could go - her brother is performing a wonderful ballet piece next Friday in NYC 
but doubt I could take a week away from my job and home again so soon after the college tours last week.
Oh - and speaking of which - here’s an interesting tidbit. Our aviator daughter (third in the trio) just got an increased scholarship offer to a school she liked in Florida. However, the tuition was so high (and likely still is) that I took it off the list and threw away her portal sign in info weeks ago. Do the music schools do this, too? The whole thing is starting to feel like a new car lot - with the sticker price, the real price and the haggling. Yikes!
@tripletmama - when my son was in college, he had a friend from California who applied to the Juilliard jazz program (among others), was very excited to pass the prescreen, and flew from California to New York on the appointed date for his audition. The Juilliard jazz program has a “callback” process, where you have a 15-minute audition in the morning and then have to wait for several hours for them to post a callback list in the early afternoon. If you’re on the callback list, then you have a second audition later that afternoon, and get your decision at the end of March. If you’re not on the callback list, then, in their words, “you may reasonably conclude that you are not under further consideration for admission.” My son’s friend did not make the callback list. I always thought that was about as cold as it gets. At least the audition was on a Friday, so my son’s friend hung out with my son and other NYC friends for the weekend, went to some jazz shows, and tried to have a good time before heading back to California. And he did get into some other very good programs.
I’m always confident that everyone will ultimately end up someplace where they can grow and develop and thrive, but it can be a brutal process. Again, good luck to everyone! The end of this process continues to get closer.
@Jazzpianodad - yup - been there, done that. When we lived in SC our daughter applied to the Colburn Academy in LA (high school program). She worked very hard on the video - to the point that the bass instructor at Colburn told her that he was so impressed (it was a Bach Suite) that he played her tape for the principal bassist at the Cincinatti Symphony and they were very excited. We knew it was a good tape because her own instructor in Charleston was listening to it in the car and had to pull over he was so shocked. But…that was Take #201. She worked really hard. So - we flew to LA and she had a 10 minute audition (maybe shorter). She was very nervous and it didn’t go well. We even flew her bass there! But - that’s the world of auditioning for symphonies and very selective programs. I guess they can tell in a few seconds if you are what they want. Sad but true. I would think that more than that matters - but for many schools, I guess not. Audition (I guess) is king.
So - she’s doing another cross country flight tomorrow for 15 minutes. I hope that she takes the time to get to know the school. She asked for a practice lesson with Linda Oh and heard nothing back - so she’s at least going to a concert that Linda Oh is doing at Columbia on Sat. night. (didn’t your son go there?). She met Linda at Berklee last summer and Linda borrowed her bass - so hopefully she at least tries to talk to her after the concert.
So glad it’s almost over!
@tripletmama - my son learned early on that rejection comes with the territory in music and resilience is essential. It’s a lesson that has continued to serve him well now that he’s out in the real world. He’s not daunted by it and just keeps pushing forward.
The Linda Oh concert should be great. Linda is terrific and she’s put together a very good quintet, all excellent musicians, for the Miller Theatre show. And yes, my son did go to Columbia and went to many shows at Miller Theatre (as well as performing there). I’m glad that your daughter is taking in a show Saturday night. She should try to relax before her audition. I would encourage anyone auditioning in NYC to get out and see a show (or even more than one) while you’re in town. And I’m happy to make recommendations.
@tripletmama, has your daughter been flying all over the country with her bass? Wow! I don’t even know how she does it!! When my son went to Penn as a freshman, we flew his cello out via FedEx. What an ordeal! And then when he came home 10 weeks later, we had to fly it back. Thankfully, there was a very, very kind man that my son had met who was a part of a campus ministry and he drove the cello (and my son’s stuff) to FedEx and shipped it all back (we paid him extra $$ to help) since we didn’t help my son get home.
After that experience, my son decided he did not want to travel with his cello ever. LOL That’s why he’s sticking with So. Cal schools.
Yes, to get CA residency is a lot harder than other states. If you get $1000+ scholarship at a Texas state univ, you get in-state tuition. Sweet deal!
I wish your D the best and hope she gets her lesson with Linda Oh!
@tripletmama we found that at least 3 schools increased their offers towards the end with no action on our part.
@sbjdorlo - thank goodness she hasn’t been flying with her bass. She is now more confident in her playing and she has been renting or borrowing basses for her auditions. Having said that, she very picky about the bass she uses - she likes to go to a place that have a ton to choose from and tries them all out before picking one. It was just the Colburn Academy audition 2 years ago that she brought her own bass. It actually wasn’t too bad. She borrowed the “hard casket flying case” from her instructor (a professional bassist)) and we flew Southwest non-stop to LA from Atlanta. Southwest is the best for flying instruments - as I recall, they only charge $150 and are good with instruments. Other airlines are much more expensive and not as easy going.
Since then - she has rented in Boston (twice) and upcoming in NYC as we don’t own a traveling casket case (which is very expensive - $5k as I recall). She is very fickle and sometimes she falls in love with her rental bass and other times, not so much.
@jazzpianodad - Not sure if she will have much time to go to another show beyond Linda’s - but maybe on Friday. She’s not sure where she will practice on Friday night and Saturday- any ideas on that? She will be staying with her brother and/or his friends at Lincoln Center next to Julliard so presumably there are practice rooms around there? I’m sure she will figure it out…and Jazz at Lincoln Center is right there if she has time. Speaking of Julliard - I just found out that her brother will be dancing original choreography next Friday - set to jazz which will be played by Julliard jazz musicians. I had a brief moment of “wouldn’t it be great if our daughter and son would collaborate someday?” moment. It nearly happened on the Nutcracker a few years ago (when she was still playing classical). I’m still hoping it will somehow happen someday. A mama has to dream.
@tripletmama - S also had one of his offers increased between Music school acceptance and final financial award package letter. We had no idea they would do that.
Typing this as we sit on a super full early flight to the east coast…and realized when we got to the airport that S forgot his cello bows (for a vibraphone piece). Somehow he thought they were my responsibility since I carried them last time. Disconnect? Or just leaving the house at 5:15 AM does something to the teenage brain? Oh well he will just have to see if he can borrow some…
Looking forward to seeing McGill again - this time in its more typical nature (last time it was sunny and 70 degrees). Good luck to others with auditions this weekend!
@tripletmama My son has flown with his bass several times. It’s s major pain. You are definitely correct about Southwest doing a terrific job with instruments of size.
@thefirebird Definitely contact the music school admissions department. Auditions are in full swing. You should have heard about an audition timeslot by now.
S received an email from one of the teachers that he had a lesson with the same week he auditioned at that teacher’s school. The teacher said that he was checking in to see where S was in his process and wanted to know if he had any other questions. S has not yet received an admission decision from the school. We are not sure what this email means. Is S likely to be admitted? Is the teacher checking in to see whether it looks like S would accept if offered admission?
@triplemama, my daughter turned down a grad program that offered her no $. Then they continued to send her increasingly higher awards for weeks (at that point she’d already determined there was no way she would do that program.) I guess the takeaway is that if a program is at all of interest, don’t completely discount it until the very end.
Southwest used to be best; now they no longer allow you to book a seat for a cello, IIRC the recent twitter storm. From best to worst-- too bad, because otherwise they are a good airline.
About traveling basses-- in college my daughter’s friends would do extreme (to me) stuff like take a train from NY to Aspen; now that she travels professionally with groups, the bass players tend to arrange to borrow an instrument in the destination locations. The bass player in her group is a professor (a very young prof) and has a great network, so although it’s a lot of work, it’s not impossible. Flying around with the instrument is just prohibitively expensive. Of course, they always need to pay for a plane seat for the cello, a cost borne by the whole group. I’m so glad my daughter chose instruments that are (usually) allowed on as carry-on.
https://www.fim-musicians.org/airline/southwest-airlines/
^^the bad news
I was able to book a seat for my son’s cello on Southwest last month in spite of that written policy. We didn’t have any problem, but the mere existence of that policy did make the whole thing more stressful, in spite of the fact that no one gave us any trouble, the flight attendants were great, and the cello fits just fine in a window seat.
I wouldn’t want to fly with anything bigger and I kept wishing my son would decide on a local college or to drop cello and pursue choral music instead!