<p>Viola, in my opinion your last post is dead on, that the experience people have is the experience they have,and when they relate what others have said, it is their experience, and there are few absolutes (and yeah, I had to learn that lesson, what you see or think you see isn’t what you get necessarily). The thing that I think is critical is that that experience is valuable, even if others haven’t had the same experience, because it indicates what could possibly happen,it is why you need to talk to people and get a feel for things, because generally (at least in my experience), if what something someone says gybes with what others say, it usually indicates what is potentially going on (and it depends on whether this is rumor or reality, there are common myths, too). </p>
<p>I think the biggest lesson I learned was how compartmentalized experiences themselves are, that a brass player could very well have a very different experience then a violin player in the same program, that a program that one person found to be hypercompetitive to a ridiculous level was someone else’s cup of tea, and that programs change over time, and that it often is who you are around and who you hang out with:).</p>