Music at Davidson, Rice, Williams or St. Olaf?

jeke
Fri, 23 Apr 2010 02:00:37 +0000

St. Olaf and Williams are also very different schools for lots of other reasons (e.g. religious midwestern school with a dry campus vs. liberal New England mountain village). Williams is probably academically stronger in general, though I don’t know if this extends to music since that’s a particular strength of St. Olaf. I would tend to lead towards picking the place you’d rather spend four years at, rather than just going for the better musical program (since after all, if your only concern was strength of music program over all else, you probably would have applied to conservatories). If you think Williamstown is horribly isolated and boring, then you probably shouldn’t come here. If you’re not so interested in the religious overtones of St. Olaf, then maybe you shouldn’t go there. And so on. My guess is that those sorts of considerations are probably going to be more important to you, in the long run, though of course it’s your choice.

One last thing is that a smaller music program does have the silver lining of generally presenting more opportunities to take on leadership roles. If you’re interested, it’s not too difficult to work your way to being a student conductor of one of the Williams choirs (you basically just have to take the choral conducting class and convince Brad you’re halfway competent), which is great experience (especially if you want to go on into teaching or directing) that you might not get as easily elsewhere.