nope

[bloke]

Yeah, I got the certificate and dealt with this for about one semester and then left.
The next year I got a job as a studio teacher at a university, and it was the same thing so I left there as well.

The aftermath of young scholars' exploits - destroyed instruments - I can deal with those. Destroyed instruments don't lie, and they don't talk back.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/945736513 ... 7S9Ucbxw6v

[the elephant]

I do not have any degree at all.

Having come to school from living and gigging in New York City along with three years of Army organization, no-BS work ethic, and discipline, I found school to be drudgery for me to be endured. I was used to self-educating, and the classes were so slow in that regard.

I was a music education major until my third year. By that time I had been teaching privately in schools for two years and was a voracious observer of how classrooms worked at that time. I was shocked by how things had declined in the 12 years since I had been in the beginning band.

I got fed up with the nonsense and decided to drop music altogether. I changed my major to "Business Undecided" and walked to my favorite lunch spot. I won't go into details, but something very important happened to me at lunch that day, and I literally ran the three miles back to the university Bursar's Office to change my declared major again, this time to performance, this time for good.

This degree plan afforded me the flexibility to dabble outside the schedule while staying within the program, so I wrote my own degree plan, taking courses that I felt would benefit me in real life versus some of the crap the university thought I needed to know. (I got into some small amount of trouble at a Brass Department meeting of students and professors, when, prompted to ask questions after their flowery, BS-laden speech about what they felt we needed in our educations, I bluntly asked the department chair, "When will you teach us how to get paying gigs in the D/FW area? When will you teach us to set up and maintain a successful private teaching studio?"

I managed to stretch my degree out as long as I needed in order to take these additional classes and get the education I felt I wanted to pay all that $$$$$$ for. (My private teacher gave me a gem of a lesson over coffee at the Student Union cafe one day during my sophomore year. He said, "Never accept the education you are handed. Demand more. Ask questions. Read more than assigned. Read it because you want to know the information. If you don't want to know it, get out of music. TAKE the education you want."

So I did.

I attended five years plus two summer sessions for four summers. I had something like 25 hours more than my major required. I was still shy of one semester of academic work, some of which was music coursework I felt had no practical value for me as a working tuba player, and some was core academic work that I thought was a waste of my time. (I do not need biology or chemistry. I already knew more through my own genuinely curious studies than any of those 19-year-old kids would remember two years after they graduated. Remember that I was a freshman at the age of 23 so I needed to get done and into a Master's program ASAP.

Then I won this job. I was 28 at that time, and I decided to finish up that semester with my jury and finals, get another job for the summer, and scrimp every penny to help me get moved from Denton to Jackson. I won the audition on a school-owned 188, and my grandfather, on short notice, loaned me several thousand bucks to buy a horn.

I have never felt the need to go back to school. I have a small, low-paying (but full-time) job, I can make money as a freelance player, I can play the bass, I can arrange when needed, I can teach, I can do high-level hand copy work or excellent computer music engraving, I can write, I can research, I can play policies and schmooze and effectively sell season tickets, I can run office equipment, I can do all of my own car maintenance and repairs, I can do some fairly serious work to brass instruments… who needs a degree? I have still taught at a major university (small music program, though) and chose to leave for the same reasons Joe did. It was a job field dominated by work to continue to justify employment by the university. I was paid very little for my time when you include all the self-justification work, the perpetuation work, the students were unwilling to buckle down and work, attendance was poor, as it had been for many years prior to my arrival on campus, and my attempts to correct this were met with stonewalling and grade-changing. Then one year they waited until the week prior to classes to let me know that all mileage money had been cut from the budget for adjunct professors. So with one week until classes started I told them to go pound sand. I will never seek out that sort of ridiculous work again. I do not hold a doctorate, so I had no desperation to find teaching work at any cost. I left.

I think my life plan worked out for me exactly as I wanted. I have been in this job for 32 years now. I am still a very active player at the age of 60, and a number of well-known players and teachers come to me privately for career advice or info about certain horns, teaching methods for dyslexics, etc. I am a nobody, but I am somebody within the ranks of nobodies, heh, heh…

Changing my life away from the whole Music Education/Band Director/Professor life was probably one of the better decisions I have ever made. Enlisting in the Army was the best; I needed the Army at that time. Deciding to keep this job once I had attained tenure (rather than resigning and returning to school, as had been my plan) was another good decision.

Not going for that teaching certification, and not conforming to "the plan" (however good and successful it may be for thousands of others) was what *I* needed to do. I have made many mistakes in my life, followed some dead-ends, etc. I do not think that any of these fall into that category.

Think about what you are doing. Think about it with blunt honesty. Be realistic. Get your head out of the clouds. What can you realistically do for the next five decades of your life? Do what you need to do in order to succeed at that, and if that means to alter or even abandon your degree plan then do that.

Be prepared for the fallout, and the negative effects of such a decision.

Then proceed apace with your nefarious plans for world domination.

If you want to play — not teach at a university — a performance degree is of no help outside of the education itself. It opens zero doors. It affords zero opportunities. Instead, follow your OWN plan while working on that "useless degree". Take a lot of time to devise a non-idiotic plan, too. You have to do that. The stuff does not just happen. It requires a good deal of thought. Winging it is a stupid thing to do.

Some of us just don't "conform to standards".

Best of luck.

"Never accept the education you're handed. Grab more. Study what you need to get where you want to go. Ask lots of questions. Get to know professors outside of class. Some of your best education will come from random conversations over coffee."
— Don Little, 1989

[bloke]

American symphony orchestras are slowly but surely drying up.
The per-service jobs are shrinking and the full-time jobs (from $30,000 to $130,000) are being worked down to less money paid out to musicians bit by bit over time, even though money is worth less and less bit by bit over time. These jobs - which are both shrinking in the amount they pay and the quantity of them - are being chased by more and more musicians who seem to feel a desperation to be involved with any of them, at any low pay no matter what.

Knowing this, if someone still wants to pursue this track - and that auditionee has a bunch of degrees - including a terminal degree or two, knowing how (some) audition committees of (some) orchestras think, I might suggest leaving some of the degrees off of the resume.

I might even suggest - if the top degree is a terminal degree from an extremely prestigious school - to ONLY list that one school, don't admit that it's a doctoral degree, and just write the word "diploma" - along with a mention of the prestigious teacher at that institution, wherever that teacher's name needs to be listed in the resume.

A plurality of orchestral musicians seem to be impressed with really talented players who - like Wade - find work playing without having spent years and years and years in school auditioning and auditioning and auditioning, and not having been chosen for any jobs.

[Schlitzz]

It wouldn’t be a good idea, to omit your completed degrees. That could come up in a background check, or a periodic one. But the resume should have areas of expertise, to show you can perform the assigned duties.

[bloke]

It wouldn’t be a good idea, to omit your completed degrees. That could come up in a background check, or a periodic one. But the resume should have areas of expertise, to show you can perform the assigned duties.

I think 99% of the time you're right, but - with a whole bunch of orchestral musicians who form a whole bunch of committees (and I'm not saying every single committee and every single orchestral musician) - to a whole bunch of them, the more times someone kept re-enrolling in schools (who actually wanted to be an orchestral musician), the more it seems to them that it's likely a weak candidate. Again: They kept auditioning, not getting chosen for a job, and then going back to school (either believing that they just needed to find the magic teacher, or they picked up some adjunct work that included a free degree, or etc.)

I know that I'm only speaking of some orchestral musicians and some committee members, but it seems to me that if a resume shows one degree or most of a degree with a really strong respected teacher, and then an orchestral job that pays anything between $7,000 and $30,000 after that... or maybe even less than $7,000...that they're going to be more interested in listening to this type of applicant - vs. one with a stack of degrees.

Musicians in academia don't seem to particularly respect orchestral musicians, and orchestral musicians don't seem to particularly respect musicians in academia, again: as a very overly broad generalization.

Also, ranges of dates that degrees or matriculation occurred should be left off of resumes.