<p>After my daughter’s placement at All State symphony orchestra, she’s gained new confidence in her abilities as a violinist. She’s got all her applications in and is just beginning the audition process. This weekend is her first audition at Ithaca college for education and performance. </p>
<p>Her other schools, which she’s applied to as a music education major, are SUNY Fredonia,
Hartt School of Music, and Indiana University.</p>
<p>At this point it’s too late to apply to conservatories.
I had encouraged her to apply to a couple that are nearby just in case. She didn’t. </p>
<p>What are her best options at this point?</p>
<p>I’m thinking that she may need to start as a music ed major at some of these schools and then switch to performance if possible. She may also want to transfer but it would be hard to try out teachers at other schools once she’s established at a school next fall. </p>
<p>I guess she’s still trying to find herself and what her true vocation is.</p>
<p>Can she update her application to include performance (either on its own or in addition to music education) at those schools? Certainly at Ithaca and Hartt, there are plenty of students who take the performance track and also take advantage of the excellent Suzuki training there…if teaching but not K-12 certification is something she’s interested in.</p>
<p>The deadlines have not passed for all conservatories. For example, the Colburn School (probably one of the top two or three in the country in terms of the competitiveness of admissions) has a Jan. 15 deadline. Several others have Jan 1 deadlines. The conservatory at Lawrence University has a Jan. 15 deadline, as another example. It is much less competitive than Colburn, but still an excellent school. </p>
<p>Almost all Canadian deadlines are in January or later. From the preponderance of NY schools on your list, I’m guessing you are from around there, so Ontario and Quebec schools would be close and even with out-of-country tuition are often reasonable (or even downright bargains) compared to US conservatories. The Schulich School in Montreal has an excellent strings programme.</p>
<p>Transferring into performance after first year is usually fairly easy. Your daughter may lose one or two courses in the transfer as some of the music ed courses may not count towards a performance degree at some schools. </p>
<p>I would try calling the schools to which you daughter has applied and ask if it is possible to either add performance to the application or to change mus.ed. to performance. Given that it is still early December and many schools will have scarcely started processing their applications, this might be an easy thing for a school to do.</p>
<p>Make certain that wherever your daughter ends up going that she has a violin teacher with whom she would be comfortable studying with for four years.</p>
<p>You are right that transferring from one school to another is difficult, both in terms of the application/audition requirements and in terms of the potential loss of courses. Generally the course loss is much greater between schools than it is between mus.ed. and perf. within the same school.</p>
<p>There are certainly some schools with deadlines that haven’t passed yet, and it’d be a good idea to try to get applications in. If that doesn’t work out, though, I think starting as an ed major at whatever school would be a fine idea. The curriculum for an education major and performance major shouldn’t be much different (if at all) at most schools, and hopefully the chosen school will be enough of a jump quality-wise from high school to provide a little challenge. From that point, all your kid needs to do is practice like crazy at school and try to take some lessons while working out the transfer stuff. </p>
<p>I don’t know how declaration of major works at Indiana, but if you can have them change the application now from ed to performance, it would be great if she would end up there, as that would certainly fit the bill for a performance major. </p>
<p>Of course, if there’s some question of whether or not she may want to teach in a public school at some point in her life, I think the most sound option would be to get an education degree from a school that also has a strong performance program (IU, Michigan, NU, etc.). You can’t teach without an ed degree, but nobody cares what you majored in as a performer. This may be old news, but I thought it’d be worth mentioning.
Also, a note on Michigan: I don’t know if they still do it, but they used to have a program that was performance with a teaching certificate (I think it was called “Performance - C” or something) that was a performance track combined with the bare essentials to be certified to teach. Seems cool for people considering teaching but serious about performance.</p>