@albertsax, United was the airline that gave us the problem. Really dependent on gate agent I suppose. I am following up with the airline, however, with hopes of minimizing issues in the future.
@Busy_Momma - United is notoriously bad for customer service (and how they treat musical instruments…I recall a viral exchange from a musician whose guitar got trashed by United.) If you can possibly fly anyone else, I’d highly recommend it.
Telling flight attendants that your child is auditioning for college level music programs will also go a long way once you’ve gotten past the gate agents. They have hung up S’ nice clothes in the first class closet, found room for cello bows and various other accoutrements we’ve schlepped on the audition trips. Also on smaller commuter sized airlines, the seating is 2 x 2 so getting seats together frees up a lot of room under the seats in front which should fit an instrument of normal size (aka one that would fit in a regular sized plane’s overhead).
@akapiratequeen - did the TSA agents give you funny looks when the ice skates went through the x-ray? We had a lot of funny encounters with either the snare drum or the tambourine when we flew this winter. My favorite was the TSA agent who used to be a marching band drummer and wanted to try S’ sticks out for old times sake. We got smart and would send the drum through first and then the stand since it is a long metal object that looks suspicious… 
I’ve been reading on and off for about a year. Just caught up on the 2023 Journey thread. Wow, lots of great info! Thanks for sharing. My child is considering jazz performance undergrad 2024. This question may sound naive, but @akapiratequeen how did your son gain access to all the application essay questions so he could complete them the summer before senior year? This sounds like a great idea, but I thought that apps didn’t open until August 1st. Thanks in advance!
@MusicSchoolSeeker that’s a great question for @akapiratequeen. I would also love to know how to get a jump on essays as soon as possible.
Hi @MusicSchoolSeeker and @SweetStrings – I’m already enjoying your stories as I finally relax from our long roller coaster ride! In answer to your question, the common app essay questions only change every two years, so we knew they would be the same in 2018 as they were in 2017. In fact, the common app has just announced that they will remain the same again! Here you go:
https://www.commonapp.org/whats-appening/application-updates/2019-2020-common-app-essay-prompts
Full text:
2019-2020 Common Application Essay Prompts
- Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
- The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
- Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
- Describe a problem you've solved or a problem you'd like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma - anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.
- Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
- Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?
- Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.
During the 2018-2019 application year, the most popular topic of choice was: “Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.” (24.1%). The next most popular topics were: “Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.” (23.7%), followed by “The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?” (21.1%)."
In addition, the supplementary questions generally don’t change significantly from year to year, for each school. We referred to the previous year’s questions for most of the schools where he applied.
Hope this helps! We started with one of the prep books, brainstormed ideas, and then S wrote a few different versions before settling on one that he fine-tuned. He didn’t write about music in the main essay, though many of the supplements required it.
Enjoy the ride 24/22ers! No doubt you will have experiences along the journey that you will never forget. Our S came to music as a major focus very late in the game and we felt completely overwhelmed by the process. Thank goodness I stumbled on CC last fall and it has been our guidebook for pre-screens, auditions, waitlist questions, financial aid etc. Even learned about travel-sized humidifiers on this board—which no doubt was what held my kid’s vocal chords together through a brutal run of auditions that covered 8,500 miles in 10 days in mid-February
PS If your kid does the audition tour, write down the make, model and color of rental cars and where you’ve parked them—S and I were so focused on his audition at Frost that we weren’t paying attention to where we’d parked and nearly missed flight from Miami to LA.
PPS The audition tours can be really expensive. You can save money by shopping the online ticket vendors but NEVER pay the baggage fee through that service. If you are checking bags, pay for it at check-in.
PPS If your child is flying alone between two stops, duct tape important papers and any other critical things to his/her person.
Another piece of advice: use the acceptance threads from previous years to see which posters have experience with which schools. Then if you have questions about a school, you can tag or private message parents who’ve done the application/audition process. So helpful for everything from learning about teachers to finding hotels that will let your kids practice. Here’s the thread from class of 2023: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/music-major/2119460-acceptance-thread-for-undergrad-class-of-23-grad-class-of-21.html#latest
@akapiratequeen Wow! Thank you so much! This is a tremendous help.
A random piece of information which will likely not prove helpful to most, but I figured I’d share it anyway.
My son decided very late in the game that he wanted to apply to Peabody. It was so late in the game that the application deadline had already passed. He wrote an email to admissions and asked for permission to apply late. They gave him 48 hours to get his application in which required a lot of scrambling because he needed to get 3 recommendations submitted over a weekend. He auditioned and was ultimately admitted. I don’t recommend this strategy, but am sharing it because it was an eye opener for me that sometimes there is more flexibility on the deadlines than you may realize.
@Sweetstrings : A 100% of my sons auditions with a violin last year were gotten to on Southwest : NY, Boston, Chicago, LA. The year before, he got a “new” violin, and a solid BAM case to go with it. We also got the quilted cover for his case to help with keeping the damp out. We also always ended up paying the $15/- for an early bird boarding on Southwest to guarantee him overhead bin space (We continue to do so - it’s the best $15/- we’ve spent). Also he makes sure to put his backpack and jacket over his violin to prevent others from shoving stuff in over it. There was only one time that he had to intervene and tell someone they couldnt put their carryon over his violin.
Also, loosening strings on the violin on a plane is not a good idea since the low humidity will actually cause them to loosen even more. Packing a sock or two around the bridge sounds like it may help - thanks for that.
Finally, esp. when you’re traveling to auditions with a string instrument, try to do some research on reliable luthiers at your destination in case you have an emergency. We ran into this when we flew to Boston from SF for the NEC audition, and were scrambling around to find one that would be open on Presidents day (not all of them are). Luckily we did find someone and were able to get his instrument in decent shape about 3 hours before his audition. Could have done without that stress :).
Good Luck '24.
@parentologist Another reason not to do sample lessons in the summer: Most of the faculty are gone at summer music programs and festivals. When I took my daughter to Eastman last summer for their music program, we used the time in the region to drive down to CIM and Oberlin to check out the schools. We had tours at both schools, but not only were the students gone, there were no faculty on campus to meet or have lessons with. (In the case of Oberlin, we’d just missed them by a few days!)
And actually, this is something to be aware of when choosing summer programs. Very few Eastman faculty were at the summer Music Horizons program… My daughter only met one full-time professor – the rest were excellent, but visiting instructors from other schools or visiting full-time musicians. It was a great experience for my daughter, but not an opportunity to get to know the VP faculty she might work with as a student at Eastman, and definitely not any kind of leg-up in admissions in the sense of finding a professor who will advocate for you to be admitted because they want you to be in their studio. So if you are using a summer program to try a school on for size, that’s an important thing to ask about in advance. Some schools DO employ their regular faculty for their high school summer academies – Oberlin is one.
Let me add one caveat: I’m speaking here about VP – don’t know about other instruments or concentrations.
@khill87 That’s really interesting. We had the opposite experience at the Eastman Jazz Workshop. My S worked with the professor who is now his studio head as well as several other regular faculty. The previous summer, at Berklee, he worked with adjuncts and grad students —no one he would have seen again. So yes, definitely ask!
And to chime in, at the Percussion camp last summer at Jacobs (IU) all the full-time faculty were there. So, it definitely is worth asking about in advance.
Making my apply list is difficult, because applying to music school doesn’t work the same way as “normal school” … You can’t really quantify your level of talent, resume, etc. Plus admit rates mean much less due to the wide range of instruments auditioning, differences in faculty, needs from year to year, etc. Given all this, does anyone have a good way to create a broad list of schools to apply to, incorporating the age-old wisdom of reach/target/safety schools?
I notice quite a few (dare I say most) of the posters in this thread are performance majors or parents of performance majors. I am not a performer. In fact, I didn’t want to take voice lessons for the longest time. My parents helped me discern the pros and cons, encouraged me, and I finally decided (after going in for a trial lesson, haha!) that private voice lessons would help my musicianship and audition skills. Anyway needless to say I don’t consider myself a performer. So, my resume pretty much completely lacks solo performances (although I have quite a few eye-catching chorus roles). As a non-performance, non-comp major, I am trying not to get psyched out because I know I have something totally different to offer.
Here’s another audition tip. Our travel budget was very limited so our daughter flew to two auditions (from west coast to east coast) on her own. I was nagging her from afar and helping her when she didn’t like the bass she rented (get that sorted out before a weekend), when she was sick and when she stayed with her triplet brother and they had a big fight. So - our air travel budget was cut in half. She is fairly independent but she also is spacey so I laughed at the “duct tape important documents to their body” advice. Make sure that they do more than the 15 minute auditions - e.g. sit in on a class or two, act interested, ask for a practice lesson.
And don’t wait until the last minute to download pre-screen tapes. It was a scramble for our daughter with me on a computer, our other daughter on her computer, trying to download videotapes at the stroke of midnight. I seriously got some grey hairs that night. The thing that nightmares are made of!!
I highly recommend that your musician try to go to a summer program at any of the colleges they are interested in. This solidified our daughter’s top choice (as it did for @akapiratequeen’s son and I’m sure others).
Great advice. I think we can do something about this. I will start a thread and capture some local names for my D’s instrument for future visitors. If others can add luthiers / setup shops for other instruments and cities I bet we can create yet another valuable resource for future year auditioning musicians musicians and their families.
@HereWeGoAgain2018 that’s an excellent idea!!
Hi all! I just wanted to say I’m so excited to read about all of your journeys and where your kids end up!
@Music2023 my guitarist S’s graduating from NEC in a month. He’s loved it there.
A friend sent this to me, knowing that Oberlin is high on my daughter’s list of possibilities. Not great news for our kids… although maybe some of them will find a home at the college rather than at the conservatory: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/18/amid-budget-deficits-and-unfavorable-demographics-oberlin-pushes-do-more-less