<p>If you are serious about studying music with another major, and don't want to spend your college years on a bus going back from Johns Hopkins to Peabody, U of R to Eastman, Harvard, well, you know the drill. How about one of the larger schools, like Indiana University or University of Michigan. They always dominate the rankings, and you could be at a top music school while being able to study what you want. Besides, you could get major scholarships.</p>
<p>violinguy, my D is planning a double major in music and a hard science, so we have explored this in detail. </p>
<p>Veteranmom is correct. There is no school of music for undergraduates at Yale or any other of the Ivy League universities. The student is accepted to the undergraduate college and then chooses to double major. Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and to a lesser degree, Penn do have performance opportunities for undergrads, but it is a general BA degree and not a BM or BFA. Yale, Harvard, and Columbia have 5 year BA/MM programs: Yale with its own graduate school of music, Harvard with the NEC and Columbia with The Julliard School. Students may apply anytime from prior to the freshman year to the end of the sophomore year and must be accepted at both programs independently (your chances of being accepted in the undergraduate school do NOT increase if you are accepted to the conservatory and vice versa). This is extremely rare. Harvard had 1 student last year. Columbia less than 5 students. I don't know how many students do this at Yale, but the faculty my daughter met with during her interview said "few, very few". You have to be tops in violin nationally to get accepted. As a Julliard recruiter my D spoke to put it, "We don't want to bake the cake. We just want to ice it."</p>
<p>Some specifics: At Harvard, you must write a senior thesis that combines your two majors. This is not difficult with some double majors, nearly impossible with others. Think carefully about this. Penn has historically been quite good in music composition, and weak in performance. This has changed in the last few years and the music department is doing its best to arrange performance opportunities for its best musicians. A friend's son sat 1st chair cello in the Penn Orchestra from his freshman year onwards. He arranged for private lessons at Temple. He double majored in English and music. His last 2 years, Penn arranged for private chamber music lessons for a string quartet in which he played. Brown has a great ethnomusicology department, but no emphasis on performance. Princeton has many many extracurricular music opportunities, but the music "concentration" (the word for major there) is weak in that there are few faculty and the focus is on composition, not performance. I don't know anything about the programs at Dartmouth or Cornell.</p>
<p>Oberlin has a 5 year BA/BM program to which they accept 25 students per year. These are the top applicants to both the college and the conservatory who have to be accepted independently to both. It is very rigorous, and when we spoke with the chairman in my D's specialty, he told us that most students switch to a straight conservatory program along the way. Other parents have posted that their experience is different and that many students do complete the double degree program.</p>
<p>Now, let's look at your specific case with the understanding that you are a junior and with the statistics you have posted. At all of the Ivy League schools, unless you are a URM, athlete, or VIP admit, you must be in the top 10% of your class, have a GPA >3.9 for the most part, and have SAT (the old scores) >1500-1550 (equivalent to approx 2250 on the new exam) if you are a white male. I would love to believe that you will be able to accomplish all three of these things in this year, but the numbers are stacked against you. As a white male with your statistics, it is unlikely that you specifically will get any admissions boost from applying SCEA or ED to these schools. Oberlin College is extremely selective (acceptance rate approx 30%) and the Conservatory even more so. Even if you are accepted to the conservatory as a superb violinist (you should currently sit first chair and probably have national awards to your credit), your test scores are well below the range of their accepted students at the College.</p>
<p>I would strongly recommend that you research programs that are more in line with your academic statistics. Look at Lawrence U in Appleton, WI which has a liberal arts school and a conservatory and also offers a 5 year BA/BM program. Look at larger state schools like IU, UMich, or Ohio State. Look at U of Rochester if you are a good enough violinist to get in to Eastman. Your statistics are low for Johns Hopkins, but take a look at Peabody. You might consider Univ of Maryland-Baltimore and study at Peabody. You have PLENTY of time to do your homework on this subject. Good luck.</p>