Originally Posted by
davewerden
That's not bad advice, but there are other ways of looking at it. If you have a lot of ability and want to be a performance major that's fine, but you just need to have a plan B as far as making a living.
This is the best possible advice for a young person looking at graduating from high school and looking at further schooling and a career -- and it's not at all limited to careers in music. And it's not just about making a living, but more broadly about having some kind of reasonable plan for what you want to do in life (and what you'll be able to do) if your "ideal life" isn't attainable for one reason for another.
Every year (I speak from experience, having gone through school -- all the way through graduate school -- with people like this) thousands of people get bachelor's degrees in various subjects in areas in which there are no careers. These are most typically in the humanities or arts, but not restricted to those areas. With stars in their eyes (and ignoring the explicit warnings that professional associations have been sending to them for decades now) they get accepted to a graduate program and many of them manage to get Ph.D. degrees. Way too many of them. Their ideal life is to become a tenured academic and a life-time university professor. This happens for only a very, very few. When -- often after from five to ten years of trying -- they realize this, they then face the prospect of finding a job AND A LIFE that are interesting and rewarding to them (both financially and emotionally). And at that point, that's VERY difficult because they've trained themselves only for a life that they CAN'T have. Some of them manage to recover. Some of them "retrain" or make use of skills that they've acquired and can "retarget". Others become very bitter and depressed for the rest of their lives, and have unhappy lives as a result -- always resentful that they "failed" in achieving their goals. It is wonderful to have goals and ideals that you strive for, but it is crazy and irresponsible and immature to put blinders on and see only that path. This applies to professional music careers and other careers that have severely constrained opportunities for success.
It's a difficult balance. You need enough "pedal to the metal" commitment to pursue your ideal and achieve it if that's possible -- anything less in a competitive area won't come close to succeeding. But you also want to be thinking that "For whatever reasons -- skill, luck, the economy, injury, familial obligations -- I MAY not end up with what I want." Also (and I confess that this was a large part of my own case), after spending all that time on successfully achieving that goal that you've had for so long and worked so hard for, after a few years you can look around and say "You know. I'm done with this. Need to do something else now." It's real good to always have the ability to do that.
All through my college and graduate school years, and prior to getting tenure many years ago my attitude was always "Well, I can always go back to driving trucks." Never actually did that. But I did manage to have two other careers after my "ideal" one -- the one I KNEW I wanted for my entire life when I was in my early 20s -- got tiresome and I walked away from it. So the big advice here, and just expanding on Dave's, is "Think ahead. Your life will likely be quite long. Don't paint yourself into a corner."
Gary Merrill
Wessex EEb Bass tuba (DW 3XL or 2XL)
Mack Brass Compensating Euph (DE N106, Euph J, J9 euph)
Amati Oval Euph (DE 104, Euph J, J6 euph)
1924 Buescher 3-valve Eb tuba (with std US receiver), Kelly 25
Schiller American Heritage 7B clone bass trombone (DE LB K/K10/112/14 Lexan, Brass Ark MV50R)
1947 Olds "Standard" trombone (Olds #3)