<p>Pretty much what I wrote above. I'm accepted to USC Thornton, and will be going this Fall as a transfer. I'm torn though because I really do love music, and I want to major in it because I want to see how far it'll take me and how well I can get at it. But, I'm not 100% set on having a music career- I think I could be happy doing a wide variety of things, and am very intellectually curious on a multitude of non-music levels as well. I know that some people are very much gung-ho about music as being their only thing and their lives- and that's not me, I love travel, languages, creative writing, animals- too many things! But I have to choose a major, and I was accepted into this great program. As I'm a transfer the likelihood of me being able to double major without going to school for a million extra years is not super great. Maybe a minor, but I really do want to explore all my musical options while I can so I was thinking of minoring in music tech, which I'm also interested in. But this leaves me scared- will I be able to realistically get a job in a non-music related field with a BA in music? I am most likely going to grad school for something eventually, but was planning on taking a few years to go into the workforce and figure some more of that stuff out rather than jumping right in. I know the economy's rough, but I do have some skills (non-music internships and I speak French fluently), but it does worry me! Does anyone have any advice?</p>
<p>It’s fine to major in music and then work in other fields. A BM or a BA in music are both bachelor’s degrees like any other, and give you access to jobs requiring a bachelor’s. You can go to grad school in any area, academic or professional, including medicine or law. There are also music-related jobs you may not have thought of. Are you doing a BM at USC Thornton?</p>
<p>I’m doing a BA- I wanted to have more flexibility in terms of taking coursework outside of the major since I have such a wide range of interests.
I guess I’m worried that I might not be hired, like if others are considered more qualified if they get their BAs in other subjects, I don’t know. :/</p>
<p>Compmom is right. You can certainly get jobs and careers outside of music with a music degree. I know an insurance executive with a BM in percussion performance and a vice president of a large grocery company with a BA in music. Many people end up in careers that have nothing to do with what they studied in college. If you love music take this time to pursue studying it. Many of the skills necessary to earn the BM are transferable to other professions: public speaking/performance, time mangement,commitment to practicing and working in ensembles(groups) just to name a few. If it would make you feel more confident, try taking a few business courses so you won’t feel intimidated by the non-music world.</p>
<p>I agree with Momofbassist and compmom. Take as many electives in another field outside of music that you are interested in. This will serve two purposes - you will find out if you like the second field and you will be more prepared for graduate study in that field if you do like it and want to continue on. This really is the time to concentrate on your music - you may not get another chunk of time in the future to do it so practice and be the best you can be!</p>
<p>You’re asking this in a music major forum… so keep that in mind while reading optimistic answers</p>
<p>The answer is obviously no.
You’ll have a hard time finding a well-paying career with a music degree.</p>
<p>If you really love music then you’ve gotten into a great program for it, but if you honestly see yourself 5 years down the line saying you want to try something else it will be extremely difficult.</p>
<p>Why do business majors ■■■■■ the music major forum? Easy pickings? In point of fact it is not “extremely difficult” to go into another field after an undergraduate degree in music. Two of D’s close friends who got their BM’s in music are now in Med school. One of them in UCSF and the other at Berkley. D’s job between her BM and MM was writing proposals at a Civil Engineering firm. After a year there they offered to fund her education if she went back to school. When she left, management asked her to find another music major as a replacement. In short, all of these graduates are not just moving on to Starbucks. Granted it’s not the easiest path…but the arts never are. </p>
<p>And discoinferno----the term “well paying” and “fulfilling” are not interchangeable.</p>
<p>Fact: Most job recruiters who come to universities do not care what the students majored in. They are looking for trainable people who have all the usual traits of any great job candidate: team player, responsible, hard working….exactly what Momofbassist said. I apologize for repeating myself, as I have mentioned this on other threads. The way to get a job is not just what goes on in the classroom. Get out and get part-time jobs, internships, volunteer, be club presidents etc. Show that you can take charge. That is how you get jobs after college, no matter what your major. A friend’s D graduated with degrees in Psych and Spanish and is now waitressing (2 years later). Look at all those Yale and Harvard grads tutoring at SAT prep courses, just to earn a few bucks. So as I see it, a BA in music throws you in the same pool as most other BA’s, which means it’s your internships and other experiences that will make you stand out.</p>
<p>Yes, yes, and your friends walked into UCSF with their saxophones and dazzled the admissions department into accepting them. They didn’t complete their pre-med requirements or anything (equivalent to an entirely different undergraduate degree). Kind of a moot point.</p>
<p>Relax for a moment and read what the original poster typed: They are not convinced that music is what they want to do with their life. I’m not “trolling” them by giving them my honest opinion that it’s very difficult to market a music degree in other professions. Everyone likes music and the world needs musicians, but someone who is on the fence about what they want to do with life might consider something a little more malleable.</p>
<p>Discoinferno - no need for the sarcasm here. Pre-med requirements would require an extra year post-baccalaureate if the basic bio/chem/physics/math classes weren’t taken as electives the first 4 years. With a BA, these can all be covered. Many humanities majors successfully apply to med. school.</p>
<p>The OP has many interests, so it would be hard to pin down a particular “job” that would be a good fit at this point, and that isn’t the question. We don’t know enough. What we do know is that one can major in history, english, classics, etc. and end up working in the marketing, finance, banking, law. It really depends on how the electives were used and what one’s inclinations are. If the OP said that they wanted to be a physicist or an engineer, that would be a tough one since the required coursework is rigidly defined. </p>
<p>Realistically, is it easier to get a job today with a computer science or engineering degree compared to a humanities degree (and I am equating music with humanities for the purposes of this discussion)? Probably. Though now that I think about it, I know a musician who is now working for a mid-size IT company on the programming side. They take anyone and train them. Their job ad said this quite literally. So, there is a spectrum of opportunities, as there are for other majors.</p>
<p>Strange, discoinferno, there was another business/economics major from the middle east who was your young age, who had no experience in music whatsoever and he enjoyed posting arbitrary and fatuous comments regarding the employment prospects of music majors. Sorry for the confusion.</p>
<p>I work at a major international law firm (top 50 of Am Law 100), and I noticed with great interest last year that, although the number of summer clerkships available at our firm was down significantly because of the economy, 3 of the 10 summer clerks that were here had undergraduate degrees in music. Summer clerkships are a major entryway for future employment, so it’s clear that having a an undergraduate degree in music is no impediment to a career in law.</p>
<p>Thank you all so much for the replies. As I’m interested in languages and travel, other career options could be translating, interpreting, working for an international organization of some sort- it’s pretty open. I’ve done a lot of studying abroad and international travel (I was an exchange student in France my senior year of high school and studied with Global College for a year in Costa Rica, Thailand, and Taiwan), have a few internships, summer jobs, extra-curriculars- I’m hoping that those would set me apart for something. I honestly am not looking for fortune- if I can make enough to get by, and have a job I enjoy (for the majority of the time, I suppose! ;D) that would be enough.</p>
<p>Disco, no one is blowing smoke up anyone’s tail about music and employment, yes it is probably easier to get a job in engineering or comp sci with a degree in those fields (with engineering, guaranteed)…but what that leaves out is a lot of majors have little direct relevance to what people do in the job world, at least directly. If you are talking a professional program, you need to go on to further study and a kid who has done well in a music program and otherwise met the requirements is going to be as strong a candidate as someone who majored in anything else (in fact, music students, especially BM students, because of the nature of what they study, may be more attractive then someone who majors in something ‘ordinary’ like poly sci or business). </p>
<p>The real problem is seeing a college degree as if it is strictly vocational training and in many cases that isn’t true. People major in humanities, in history, they major in biology or chemistry, and want to know something? They aren’t that great as career training directly, but people do get jobs with those. If you get a degree in business and then get a sales job in the financial industry, the background might help understand a bit of what is going on, but the nature of the products and such in the industry is UG students in business prob have little background directly related, if you are selling an analytics package that prices complex derivatives, your typical UG business student, even from an elite school, barely knows anything about the guts of the product and will need a lot of training, same it true of other jobs. Newly minted CS students often have very little work background and are caught up in the dynamic of school, where a teacher gives you assignments and you finish it, professional programming is a lot, lot different then most of what goes on in the classroom (and a lot of what you study in UG CS has almost zero relevance in what you do in professional programming)…it is the nature of the beast. College is about demonstrating the ability to be mature, to be able to learn and solve problems, it was never really meant to be another version of ITT institute (not that there is anything wrong with tech schools like that). </p>
<p>It can be easier to get a job with a certain degree, I won’t argue, but it is also a rather limited number of majors that give that. I would tell a student wanting to distinguish themselves on the first job to not major in Business, because its reputation has been severely tarnished as the kind of major that drunken frat boys take and many employers look and see ‘oh, another business major’, whereas if they see someone who has studied music and/or been a musician, they know it is a very different path and generally isn’t chosen by someone looking simply to look good on a resume, plus employers know that even getting into a decent level BM program is tough, it is a lot tougher in many ways then doing well academically, and once in it is pretty rigorous. </p>
<p>And to get ahead in many fields today you need a grad level education, and having a BM or a BA in music will give you equal (or maybe better) footing into getting into a good grad program. It might take getting some coursework done required as pre reqs, but again a grad school admissions director to Harvard Business School, seeing an applicant who went to Juilliard or NEC on Violin, versus some kid that majored in business, is going to view them differently, one went through a program that is different and quite rigorous, the other could be seen as following the crowd. </p>
<p>And once past the first job, your UG major won’t matter all that much, once you have established yourself in your career track or tracks, it is what you did. That kid who went to X and majored in business, even an ivy, and the kid who went to Juilliard on the violin, are going to be judged primarily on what they have done and demonstrated since college (and in the little bit it matters, a kid who went to a music program and got a BM and then did something else, would have an edge over the kid who did what so many others do). </p>
<p>This reminds me of the people who promote the idea that to be successful out there you have to go to an ivy league college and then fame and fortune will follow you, which is hogwash; in the real world, the kids with the 2300 SAT’s and the AP classes who got into HYP, often end up finding themselves working for a company managed by people who went to state schools and didn’t have a 4.0…</p>
<p>Is music easy? No, and I agree, if someone isn’t totally passionate about it they need to think if there is something else they should be doing, not because I think they shouldn’t, but rather what lies on the other side of the admissions fence takes all the passion, hard work, discipline and thick skin imaginable, and if you don’t have the passion, you likely will be miserable…on the other hand, if they are willing to do that, face that, want to do it, and then decide they want to do something else, they can. It might take more to get your foot in the door then someone who majored in an academic field, but guess what, if they had the passion and determination to get into music school, specifically a BM auditioned program at any kind of level and stuck out the 4 year grind it can be, it isn’t something they haven’t faced. </p>
<p>Put it this way, an academically orientated student when applying to a college, even an HYP, kind of knows what they need to do, there is a clear cut path, you know at the very least if you do well academically, if you do well on the SAT’s and other hashmarks, there is some sort of benchmark to be able to get in, there are objective measures that at least give you a good shot, with a smaller percentage that is subjective. The BM admission, on the other hand, is based on 1 subjective criteria alone, how well you do on a 10 minute audition…talk about pressure, talk about facing ambiguity…</p>
<p>I am not talking hypothetically, I am talking real world, I have been a hiring manager so long I don’t know how many people I have interviewed and hired over the years, or been involved in the hiring of either as staff or from another group asked to interview, and i know the kinds of things that are discussed, even with entry level kids and I can tell you that music students are well viewed. There are exceptions, if you want to be an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, you better be coming out of an ivy, but they are exceptions, not the rule; for many jobs, when we are hiring we are looking for the kids who stand out, not kids who have followed some formula or seem geared to have done what they did to impress employers.</p>
<p>I’ve never alleged one can’t get a job outside of music with a music degree. I alleged only that it would place them at a relative disadvantage.</p>
<p>They’ll be competing with candidates who studied to enter that same field for ~3-5 years. I’m not an Ivy-worshiper, and I border on viewing today’s MBA programs as a fashion accessory. I merely felt that some of the answers were blindingly optimistic.</p>
<p>I also don’t think music is easy and I have played piano and classical guitar for 10 years. Composing and playing good music is harder than what the average businessman does day to day, have no doubt. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, the world doesn’t pay you based on the difficulty of your job, it pays you based on how many doors you can slip into before they close. Someone with excellent social skills can get a degree in literally anything and still land a “good” job, but they may inevitably hit a promotional ceiling without some quantitative academic background, certifications, etc.</p>
<p>Again, there is a difference between looking down on/mocking music degrees (I am a fanatical music lover) and just wanting to give someone an honest answer.</p>
<p>One of the top statisticians I know in my field was a music major. She loved music. It was her passion and that’s what she took in college ,but also did well in math and took enough courses in it so that she had a sound enough base for future work in it. She did has worked in music as well and it is still a big part of her life as she is in a very good community orchestra and has played in some prestigious venues. But her bread and butter as a full time job is a math related job. </p>
<p>My DH hires on the basis of what a candidate knows in terms of math, econ and finance and the degree could be in piano, voice performance or anything as long as they know certain fundamentals needed in an entry level job with his department. Even being a major in any of the key subjects is not useful to him, if the candidate cannot use the information in the way needed, at least at a certain level. </p>
<p>My former class/room mate is heavily into the performing arts despite a background in a number of things that doesn’t even touch on that field. She never was even interested in the theater productions at college and was gung ho in other very different things. No matter. She started working at a community theater just for fun and as it took more of time and she gained skill, expertise and connections, she has found this a vocation, brushing shoulders with those who were theater, music and other PA type majors. </p>
<p>You are not stuck in your major. Very few people end up in the field where they majored other than those who picked a very narrowly focused field that funnels you right into a career that makes you self sufficient. Music and the PAs, have no such guarantees. Neither do most fields. Those who are engineering, nursing, accounting majors and other such career directed fields are about the only ones with a very high rate of the students going into the career that the major directed them.</p>
<p>Disco-
“Unfortunately, the world doesn’t pay you based on the difficulty of your job, it pays you based on how many doors you can slip into before they close. Someone with excellent social skills can get a degree in literally anything and still land a “good” job, but they may inevitably hit a promotional ceiling without some quantitative academic background, certifications, etc.”</p>
<p>No arguments there, but the mistake you are making is assuming that an UG education gives you what you are talking about, and with some exceptions that isn’t true. The kind of certifications in quant analysis generally come out of master’s programs in financial engineering or professional certification programs, UG education given the kind of courses you take in a major subject are unlikely to get the level of training needed for promotion. Yeah, in theory a kid with an UG degree in accounting could pass the CPA exam, that is an example, but someone can study for that, work for an accounting firm and pass that exam <em>shrug</em>.</p>
<p>The limits on a career are if someone doesn’t have the knowledge they need, and again most of that doesn’t come from UG education, in fact very little of it does, and that is based on real world experience. Someone coming out with a CS degree knows to a certain level how to program, but think that means they have knowledge to be a programmer on a low latency trading engine trading complex derivatives contracts, or a system to monitor the P and L of trades done by a mutual fund accounts? Think a kid coming out with an UG degree, even if they concentrated on financial math, would know enough to work as a full fledged quant? I sincerely doubt it…what you are assuming is that someone who is majored in music for example couldn’t get a degree in financial engineering or quant analysis and that is mistaken; they might have to fill in gaps in things like math, but they could do it. Likewise there are plenty of certificate programs in advanced programming, financial programming and the like a music major doing programming could take, or even learn on the job. My background was CS, but I have extensive knowledge of financial trading systems, the regulatory rules, the economics of it, how traders work across equities, commodities and derivatives yet I never had anything about that UG, and a lot of what I do on the tech side no college program would ever cover, even today.</p>
<p>Again, you are assuming that the UG education gives someone even a fraction of what they need to have a career and that simply isn’t true, most of what you do in a career you learn after college. When hiring entry level people we are looking for kids who have shown both they could do the job in college and seem to come in knowing what they want and showing they learned something (like coming into the interview actually understanding/knowing something about the business/company), again when talking entry level positions that is the norm, not the exception. Once in a job, you are judged by the skills you acquire, your ability to solve problems, to work with people and to grow. Certifications are great, in my own profession there are a ton of people from places like India who think certifications are the road to success, until they find out passing Microsoft certification or passing some standard exam on some technical field might help get them in the door, but in terms of advancement if they can’t learn things without being told, if they can’t grasp the business environment, work with people, collaborate, and apply new knowledge they aren’t going to go far.</p>
<p>There is no doubt a college degree in a certain area might make it easier to get your foot in the door but long term it evens out, and it is a relatively short window.</p>
<p>Tzipora - My D majored in violin performance. She minored in German and Chinese, is finishing up a year in China teaching English, and starts grad school in the fall for Linguistics. It’s too soon to say if she’s employable, but it didn’t hold her back from the China job, nor from grad school. </p>
<p>She applied to undergrad as a linguistics major, but they tied the scholarship money to her majoring in music. She knew going in that she wasn’t after a career as a musician. But she loved having four years being “allowed” to practice, and allowed to make music her priority, rather than trying to squeeze it in between other academics. And her degree may give credence to any part-time teaching or gigging she may wish to do.</p>
<p>Thanks again for all the responses! And binx, that’s good to hear- I’d probably be interested in doing something international or language related, whether non-profit development or translation or who knows!</p>