My S is going for his Frost audition on 2/1! So excited for him! Email didn’t show up until 5:11pm. After 5pm I thought for sure we wouldn’t hear anything until next week after waiting all day long, knowing others received emails today for February auditions. Whew…what a stressful day (for me-LOL)!
Congrats to all on your pre-screens coming through with positive results. What a great happy start to the new year.
I’m so happy so many of you are having such positive results.
Since our journey is a bit different going in as a music Ed major we have colllege acceptances but still have to do auditions for some of the programs. Some auditions are for scholarships while others are to be accepted to the major, and others yet to the school. Things in our house are still confusing and we are running out of time for decisions. He still wants to cut back on auditions. I understand that but I want him to wait on a pre-screen result before he starts cancelling but it’s a late response to come through. Then we have the added blessing of him being invited to apply for honors colleges and full tuition scholarships but aside from the massive additional essays required that he wants no part of some require coming to campus on days he has auditions elsewhere. So we really need to get some stuff figured out fast. He’s being very stubborn and not wanting to write any more essays but how can you pass up invitations to compete for more money? Anyone else have this experience or is the music scholarship all that you are worrying about? I feel like pulling in free money from as many sources as possible is a good thing.
Congrats to all on the Frost auditions – wonderful news!
BU and Carnegie Mellon pre screen results released. D invited to audition at both. Now the task of arranging travel, hotels etc. ugh!
Hi everyone-- Long-time reader. Our S is a tenor/vocal performance applicant. We know next to nothing about music but are hanging on tight during this crazy ride! I greatly appreciate all the great advice from the parents who’ve been down this path before. Hopefully we can share anything we learn this winter to help out those who are here now and those who follow. S has auditions lineup up with CMU, BU, Vanderbilt and UMich. Waiting on Northwestern. Not holding our breath on that one as he may not pass the academic prescreen.
Welcome @new2music and congrats to all! @UniversityMomOf2 my S has been invited to apply for a couple of big scholarships — leadership groups, honors college etc. — and if he has a good shot at it, we told him those essays aren’t optional unless he wants to pay the difference! We organized all his previous essays into a google drive
So he could go through and see if some material was usable, and we reviewed what he wrote to make sure he didn’t just blow it off. Not negotiable, although we picked our battles and only applied at his top choices.
With auditions around the corner, I wanted to ask about the timing of delivery of music school acceptances/rejections. Apologies if this has been answered somewhere else in this thread. My son’s music school director has suggested that decisions often come in a few weeks after the audition. Does that mean that offers of admission are made on a rolling basis, or does each school send out all of their decisions at the same time? And, for music schools within a university, are the decisions released at the same time as non-music applicants?
@new2music : If you haven’t heard from Bienen past Tuesday next week, call them - last year they “forgot” to let us know that the S had been invited for the audition - and we had to scramble to fly from California to Chicago… expensive tix.
Also, AFAIK, Bienen does not do an academic review - so if they like your S’s prescreen video, they will call him in for an audition. The admission decision depends on academics as much as the audition though.
@lkbux64 - my S has been accepted to two universities already (Miami OH and IU) but his ‘major’ is still dependent on the audition. Not sure if that’s the same at all schools (my guess is no, considering we haven’t heard from the other universities and all his applications were sent in at the same time).
has anyone heard from penn state regarding prescreens?? still no answer from them or from BOCO, whom we did early action for and are waiting on an acceptance or rejection sigh
NEC just emailed today… D has a prescreen, but it conflicts… so we are trying to reschedule Yay!!!
@UniversityMomOf2, we are in the exact same boat with all the essays, except mine is writing all the time! S is also going Music Ed and he is auditioning at 7 schools, since they all require an audition in addition to everything else. He has 3 others that are a bit different, too. He is going after all the merit money he can get. Honors College, Fellows, whatever it’s called - he’s after it. He has written so many essays that he hasn’t had a lot of time to do anything this fall other than band and essays. Maybe homework, but that is questionable! 
He has one essay in edit mode, one more to write for sure, another possible one (he’ll kill me, but I think he needs to do it!) and then nothing until February when another Honors College opens up their scholarship portal.
He has 6 weeks of auditions/scholarship interviews/and a random music honors thing thrown in. And there is the possibility of 2 more weeks depending on some of these essays he’s been writing.
It’s been totally worth it for him to write and go after everything he can. And the plus side is that now, his essays are even better than they were in the fall. Seriously, the last two have been really good.
I don’t know what I’d do if he was saying no, though. I’d just encourage your son to try it. If he doesn’t, he’ll never know if it was worth it or not.
Glad to hear that my daughter isn’t the only one perfecting her New School essay Driving me nuts. I just want it submitted already.
@perrine - thanks for the heads up about the NEC audition. With trepidation I checked our daughter’s email (she never checks her email!) and she passed pre-screens! A minor miracle considering that she submitted the wrong pre-screen video with several false starts.
However - she has Berklee audition in LA on Feb. 2 at 2:30pm and then NEC on Feb. 3 in the morning. So - to do both it would require a red eye flight going straight into an audition. Probably not the best thing to do. Having said that, her triplet brother is taking the red eye flight tomorrow night from SF to NYC and going right into a Boston Ballet audition - but it’s only for the summer program so not a critical.
Does anyone know which is easier to reschedule - Berklee in LA or NEC? It would make sense for her to audition for the New School at the same time as NEC - one East Coast trip - but that would require her to send in her application!
Glad to hear that we aren’t the only ones with a scheduling conflict. I’m not sure if I will go with my daughter on her East Coast auditions - she’s fairly independent. Have any of you not gone on auditions? Just wondering - I’d like to be there to support her (and help with last minute issues that always arise) but I do like it when she’s independent.
@tripletmama : From last years experience with NEC - they seemed easy to work with and my S was able to reschedule his violin (perf) audition fairly easily (we had the same problem, UCLA and then NEC the next day in Boston).
However, given that your D is auditioning at Berklee, you could try to move that to Boston instead of a regional LA audition ?
Either my wife or I always went to auditions, and found that it helped with dealing with logistical things that popped up . Also, S fell sick in Boston after the NEC audition, and we were glad to be there to help.
@tripletmama — glad to hear D has this “high class problem”! Agree with @gram22 that it would be ideal to move the Berklee audition to Boston rather than doing LA/Boston/NY if at all possible. Less travel, less voice stress.
Re: attending with D, you know your kid best. My S would stress much more if he had to worry about logistics (hotels, getting around, even eating breakfast before the audition) — he just wants to think about his playing. My older D might have found it more stressful to have me there! So your mileage may vary.
UniversityMomof2, what does a “full tuition scholarship” mean at the schools where your son is applying? I only ask because at our state u, the much touted “full tuition scholarship” for kids with high GPA’s, does not amount to that much money.
Nervous Nellie question now that all these prescreen offers are coming in: my S submitted his prescreen to his final school on 11/27. Received a note 12/5 saying it had been received and he would hear in a couple of weeks. Then saw that the deadline for submitting prescreens had been moved to 1/1 (this is RD).
We called two days ago and left a message at the admissions office but no reply so far. At this point, should we assume it’s a no go? (This would be somewhat surprising – it’s a big music ed program, and both his playing level and his academics are fairly high for this school.) Should we just wait, or try again next week?
Experienced parents, feel free to tell me to take a chill pill. I’d just like to get the schedule set already, especially as it involves me taking time off work!
Ugh! How can “full tuition scholarship” = not that much money?!? ?
Congrats to all for the good prescreen news, even if it was a bit slow! I haven’t posted much but I sympathize with the travel plan complications and the concerns over missed school. My son tends to miss a lot of school spring semester just from school music commitments (regional and state ensembles, festivals with his school groups, choir tour) and the auditions will make it even worse. Fortunately he has a light academic load and his time management skills are showing improvement.
@UniversityMomOf2 my son is applying music ed as well. He has university admissions, and several auto merit scholarships in hand (he’s a good student and has strong test scores but is not at the top competitive scholarship level). He certainly has refused to apply for honors colleges, and it was a long haul to get through the one required essay for his handful off applications. I am glad now he applied to a smaller list and there wasn’t more writing.
There was only one prescreen. Auditions and music ed interviews all upcoming. Waiting on admission to one school which I expect in the next week or so, as well as one or two more audition dates.
My D16 did take the competitive merit scholarship route (not music). The many many essays were grueling, but for her it paid off and got her to the school she now attends. If it were my kid and he was a strong candidate for competitive merit at schools he wanted me to pay for, I think I’d insist on an application. In my daughter’s case these schools were out of budget without the big scholarships so she was motivated to apply. Regarding honors college and additional scholarships, here in AZ (ASU Barrett) the honors college generally comes with about $1000 in extra scholarships and maybe $3000 in extra costs, give or take. There’s a fee for the honors college and the room and board for honors college dorms is among the most expensive on campus.
I haven’t been here for awhile - just sort of quietly stressing in the corner. Congrats to all those with positive pre-screen results!
My son is very anti honors college and scholarship applications and essay writing. He should still qualify for some merit aid without them and doesn’t have any schools of the $70K variety on his list so costs should be OK - it’s the getting into a music program that I’m worried about. He was actually annoyed that he was admitted to Indiana’s honors college automatically (although he’s now decided not to audition there anyway). He is not looking for academic challenges outside of music.
So far, he has been admitted to three schools, including a non-audition B.A. program (his only one), Indiana and a local public that he doesn’t want to attend. Auditions are scheduled for 1/19, 2/2, 2/9, 2/16, 2/17 and one that’s still TBD. It looks like he’ll just miss two half days of school since the auditions are not too far away and he has a day off on 2/1. He hasn’t even seen two of these schools at all yet but I’m not sure how much time he will have to poke around.
The first audition is at a school that holds all auditions in January so I’m hoping we will have a result from them earlier than the others.