Thank you @MeritHopeful for that extremely detailed, helpful information. You have a great list and I can’t wait to hear where your daughter decides to go! I’ll bet it will involve a beautiful campus in or near a town filled with rich culture and art! You seem to have a wonderful balance of “mom roles” which combine secretary, supporter, and adviser while helping her feel she is ultimately the one in the driver seat.
@dsinha -wow, your book and research sound so interesting. I’m a special education teacher so I have taken some recent classes on brain studies as they relate to education, behavior and even incarceration rates. All extremely eye-opening and compelling! You bring up some great points and perspectives to ponder.
I noticed your son has his Frost audition soon and is auditioning for the MADE program. My daughter has her MADE/CAM audition (for voice/songwiritng) on February 8th so please let me know how it goes and what to expect. Maybe it’s different for each instrument, but perhaps there may be some common areas. Still hearing there is zero merit money for the MADE candidates which is discouraging and would result in elimination of Frost for us. It is a very competitive program so it would obviously give my daughter a huge confidence boost if she got in. But she is aware of the price tag and understands our limitations, so she is trying to keep her expectations low on this one.
Good luck to your son & keep is posted!
@MMRose We went into recordings with little knowledge except the little I read on CC. I purchased the Shure microphone for my iPhone and iPad. Best purchase ever! D’s recordings were a hot mess though. We recorded three days before the deadline. Both with accompaniment and without.
I forgot to download the Shure App to my iPad, so we had to use the iPhone even though the video quality is horrible on my phone. D forgot the tripod as well. Having read not to hold the camera so that there’s no movement, I lined the phone up as best as I could on a music stand unsure if it would even turn out. I recorded with the iPad the whole time thinking this wasn’t going to work. The iPad video was beautiful, the iPhone video not so much. However, the iPhone/Shure microphone sound quality was amazing. We were in a dilemma as to which video to use. On the advice of a retired music professor, we went with the better sound quality.
@MMRose Due to the stress, she used a mix and match of the accompanied and unaccompanied pieces. She had three different backgrounds for her videos as she recorded the unaccompanied pieces at school, the accompanied pieces at the pianists studio and the smaller pieces (excerpts I think they’re called) at home in the family room. Each piece was uploaded separately.
To make a long story a tiny bit shorter, we did everything wrong with the prescreening recordings. Yet she passed all four of her reach school auditions. Based on D’s recordings, it truly is about their performance and not the quality of the video.
I highly recommend the Shure microphone. We used it last weekend to record her performing in a concert so it will be used for more than just prescreening recordings. I know it will come in handy when she attends master classes… it drowns out the soft noise in the background.
We considered Belmont but one of the biggest “must haves” on her college criteria is a diverse student body and progressive vibe in terms of social justice and welcoming all. She is Mexican-American and was skeptical about the potential for stereotyping and racism. We are Catholic but attend a very progressive church where the pastor feels the Catholic Church would be much better off if women were in charge (cheers) and he is one of the few in our area who will openly welcome the LGBGT community into his church and even baptize their children. So we are lucky! Although we know some ultra-conservatives who attend Belmont, we assume that there is plenty of room for progressives and that Nashville is a pretty open place. She knows it’s an amazing music city with tons of connections and she was slightly tempted to apply and give it a chance, want to be proven wrong. But when she saw the diversity stats, she decided not to even look. It was that important to her and she felt she had a solid list at that point. For the record, I’m sure her fears were probably silly, but I didn’t want to push something that would cause her anxiety and worry. Pretty far away from home too which is a negative in my book (but that’s me being selfish!)
@SpartanDrew Thanks for your post. D decided not to audition at Miami since there’s a new flute teacher and her audition date is the same weekend as Eastman. I’ve been worried that maybe she’s making a mistake, your post was just what I needed to read.
Have your D’s friend eat the gluten free options. I had the same issue in college, with banquet food, certain restaurants… I always thought it was a preservative. It took years to discover it’s gluten that causes this.
@AmyIzzy D has a good friend who did undergrad at Belmont and grad at Indiana. Her friend isn’t uber conservative nor uber progressive. However, she loved Belmont and the opportunities she had in Nashville. She has steered D to Belmont over Indiana for that reason. Never got the impression from her friend who happens to be hispanic that they weren’t welcoming. While not hispanic, or able to check off a minority box, D is dark skinned (Sicilian) and has no qualms about feeling welcome at Belmont. We loved the campus and the people. Sometimes it angers me that there is no box for D to check since she’s darker skinned than many of those that have a box to check. She certainly isn’t what you’d call white. I guess my point is that statistics don’t tell the whole story.
@sunnysar Great points! I have no doubt Belmont is a very welcoming place and has a diverse array of music students, even if it doesn’t show in the “traditional” way stats are done. Even my daughter admitted she was being unfair in prejudging without really seeing it for herself but she just couldn’t let go of her doubts and didn’t want us spending money to visit when she had other great choices.
We have heard nothing but positives about the music programs, especially Recorded Arts, Pop/Commercial Music and Songwriting, not to mention the connections and opportunities that Nashville has to offer! I think she associates Nashville with country music which is not her thing, but doesn’t realize the array of musical genres represented and supported there. Her friend did visit and loved it but he told her “I’m not going to lie. You will look around and see a bunch of white faces and not much else, but all friendly people.”
After attending a 98% white elementary Catholic school, she now goes to a pretty diverse public high school in a middle class neighborhood so she has friends who are white, Hispanic, African American, Indian, Muslim, Jewish, you name it. And she feels her relationships with these friends, from many different backgrounds, has been so enriching and enlightening after her earlier “sheltered” experience. So I think she just wants to find a place to continue to make such connections with a diverse crowd. We visited Ithaca College and she saw very little diversity on our musical theater tour (this was when she thought she’d be majoring in musical theatre) and asked if we could leave without doing the second tour because she just wasn’t “feeling it.”
Ironically, two schools still near the top of her list are Loyola New Orleans (Jesuit school) and College of Saint Rose (began as an all-girls college founded by nuns and is now run as an independent co-ed college but still supported by the Sisters of St. Joseph.) In both cases, though, our campus visits showed the diversity she was seeking and even had speakers/resources for Women Empowerment, Minority and LGBTQ outreach and were both huge on social justice, something she is passionate about.
So I hope I didn’t come across as taking a swipe at Belmont. I am simply reporting the perspectives and impressions (right or wrong) of my daughter in terms of what she wants in a campus and why she eliminated Belmont (for better or for worse.)
Well @DrummerDad18 just sent me some very interesting perspective he read from Malcolm Gladwell (who I love) about food and college campuses. And it makes a lot of sense. I hope he shares this! Very insightful!!
I was fascinated by this podcast episode about the relationship between campus food and other quality of life investments vs spending money on supporting economic diversity in the student population.
His conclusion: Go to schools with bad food. They will have a better mix of students.
If you want to give a listen it’s episode 5 from season 1.
Ohhh—campus food and meal plans. Both my older kids attend schools with less than stellar dining halls. In addition, the meal plans cost enough that the kids could literally go out to eat for every meal for less money. They couldn’t wait to get off the meal plan and cook for themselves, which, I suppose, hastened the acquisition of cooking skills!
Also, they were fine. They survived the meal plan dependence period. Both knew going in that the dining halls wouldn’t be great, in spite of great food at scholarship weekend visits. The schools definitely step it up to attract students—one catered everything, and the other just improves the food that weekend. It’s a well-known fact among current students.
I’ll have to listen to the Gladwell piece.
My music kid eats mostly bread, popcorn, pretzels, fruit snacks, and chicken nuggets so any dining hall should be fine.
@AmyIzzy Did you check SUNY Purchase. Sounds like a great fit for your daughter. The campus is very involved with activism so it may be a great fit for your daughter. Great music school, close to the city… We’re going to tour when she has her Mannes audition as a back up school. I think they may still be taking applications.
@sunnysar : Thanks for the info on the Shure mic. Can you post the specific model you used ? Thank you !
@DrummerDad18 USC has horrible food, according to my DS!!!
I’m not sure that all the schools step up the food - at Oberlin’s open house last year we had the ‘privilege’ of eating in the dorm and it hearkened back to when I was in college (a gazillion years ago)…just as bad. And, you’d think with a) $80K tuition and b) the liberal mindset of the student body that they would have vegan, gluten free etc. options. Nope, just bad dorm food. Had to get a snack at the one and only coffee shop in town.
Also USC 21% Pell Grant students!
My D dumped the meal plan for spring semester as well and I put that money on her New school card for groceries and restaurants. It will go much farther than her $20++ lunches of tofu and salad at the UC
@Lendlees I think I have been confirmed as partially not-a-robot. I can respond to PMs (I’ve traded messages with Vistajay in response to an exchange she initiated). But I still don’t have a button to start an exchange. Please PM me at your convenience regarding your Puget Sound and UW thoughts. Thanks.
@sunnysar Yes, we did consider SUNY Purchase but we felt the studio comp program (the closest to what she wanted) was a bit too techy for her (she was looking to be focused on the artsy side of recording.) We planned to visit last Spring or summer but it never worked out and she was happy with her list when we revisited the idea when she was applying. But I know it’s a great school and she has some friends who are hoping to get in. Being NYS residents, another SUNY/CUNY School would have been welcome. But we only have City College NY at this point.
@gram22 It’s the Shure MV88 iOS Digital Stereo Condenser Microphone. Here’s a link on Amazon where I bought it. I needed it quickly so I ordered from Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010W6W8OW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01__o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1