Dual degree in music and engineering

aibarr
Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:28:37 +0000

Dooon’t doooo it!!

I’m an engineer; my husband is a musician. My roommate all through college was a music performance major, so we got to constantly compare our college experiences with one another. We both spent 80% of our waking hours (which were most of our hours… not a lot of sleep involved in either of our college experiences!) on our classes, which didn’t overlap, practicing (for her), or problem sets (for me). Music and engineering are probably two of the most time-intensive majors… It’s nearly impossible to overlap.

Do you have to give anything up? No. Keep jazz as an avocation. Do percussion all you want, in your spare time. That’s what I did with piano, and I had a great time with it… It was stress relief and it was fun, and I know that majoring in piano performance and engineering (that was my original plan, too) would have killed my love for both engineering and piano, because it would’ve nearly killed me. Major in engineering, because you need official credentials there in order to have a chance at succeeding in that field.

And what if you want to do jazz later, as your profession? Well, look at this guy…
[Jose-Miguel Yamal :: Piano, Houston, Texas](http://www.jose-miguel.com/)

Jose-Miguel Yamal just got nominated for a Grammy nomination this past year (not a Grammy nominee, but he was on the pre-nomination list that they choose the nominees from) for best instrumental jazz solo… He’s a spectacular jazz pianist.

Majored in jazz performance, right? You’d have to, to play with the likes of Larry Slezak, surely.

Nope. He has a Ph.D. in Statistics and Computational and Applied Mathematics from Rice University.

DO both… but don’t MAJOR in both. It’s the surest way to overload yourself and make your education less than what it ought to be.