<p>Thank you guys so much for the help. I am a mezzo-soprano and i plan to major in vocal performance and musical education, and since my noteworthy experience (chorus in school since fifth grade and voice lessons) has been mostly classical music I’m guessing I have the greatest chance of success if I focus on that. I would love to do contemporary but i have very little experience with that. The one thing i want to avoid is musical theater, b/c i am not a good actress (and I’ve tried…)
I got most of these schools from a huge list of music and arts colleges and looked through each one to narrow it down, so schools like five towns college which i havent heard much about in terms of their vocal program are just on my list because they were on the original list. At this point I am just trying to narrow down my list to a reasonable number of schools that I can apply to. I am pretty flexible in terms of climate but I will go check out as many campuses as I can ASAP.
My GPA is 4.23 and my last SAT score was 1850, but I plan to retake it in October. As for auditions my voice teacher is helping me prepare the pieces and I can use the schools recording equipment if necessary.
At the moment I am leaning towards UMD because it is in-state and has an amazing voice program from what I’ve heard. Others that i am keeping on my list for now are Hartt, Oberlin, Lawrence, etc… Juilliard has such a big name and so many different music majors I actually didn’t realize they don’t have music education…
As for the future… I’m not totally sure… Since vocal performance is so competitive for girls I was thinking education would make a good backup. Then again, musicprnt, the idea of focusing on performance and turning to education later makes sense… I like it 
what do you guys think?
Anyway sorry for being unclear you can probably tell I’m a pretty disorganized person, but I have been looking through schools and was just overwhelmed by the number of possibilities. Your advice has been really helpful, so thanks again.</p>