<p>Hi all. So I am facing a bit of trade off. I am an IR concentrator at my second year. I intend to either enter a top graduate program in IR or do management consulting after graduation. Yesterday I had a piano audition for the applied music program and was admitted. Here are the pros and cons I can think of for now.</p>
<p>Pros: learning what I am interested in, include some musicians in my network</p>
<p>Cons: time consuming(10 hrs/week), costly ($720/semester, not really my primary concern though)</p>
<p>I am not going to make piano my profession, that’s something I know for sure, but I do want to play it professionally. However, If I were to join the program, how much could it help regarding grad school and job market? I really appreciate some insights because it’s heavy investment in both time and efforts.</p>
<p>This won’t have any impact on non music grad school, or non music jobs. It’s just something to decide on personally, you must be talented and sounds like you want to hone your skills. 10 hours extra isn’t too much, if you aren’t also working, and you will have music “EC” for all your life to feed the soul. When else will you get such a chance to work on your music when you are in the rat race?</p>
<p>It actually might help a little bit (or even a lot) getting into a grad school, or on a job interview. It would be something that if circumstance happened to be right, would create a “memorable” interview if the interviewer had an interest in music too. For anyone, it would demonstrate that you can handle diverse responsibilities and a “full schedule”. I’m assuming this is in addition to fulfilling the IR concentration requirements which is not so easy to do now that the total course load is higher. This likely means that semester abroad (unless it can include the music requirements) would not be doable–something to think about.</p>