That's said very nicely.bort wrote:People are too afraid of failure these days. They see failure as an endpoint, and not as a starting point for whatever is next. Yes, there's a point where you can just be an idiot about it, but I think it takes longer to get to that point than many of us want to admit.
Where you go to school and what degree you earn is the beginning of what you learn and who you become, not the sum total. In my current job, I interview plenty of people with liberal arts or STEM degrees that I would consider essentially unemployable. Of course one can go to Juilliard and acquire skills that will make you tremendously employable and successful outside of music. Maybe my degrees from Juilliard would have helped me be a professional tuba player or maybe not, but they certainly haven't ever hurt my ability to get other jobs.
Today I manage an engineering team at a very successful technology company. Juilliard and playing/teaching professionally have come up positively in every single job interview and numerous formal and informal networking contexts. My experience at Juilliard has been an enormous part of my non-musical professional success. Most importantly, the lessons of character I learned from David Fedderly and Warren Deck and by driving myself hard enough to get in (and later get out) are the easily most important thing that has helped my career. Maybe I could have learned those things somewhere else…but I didn't.
If someday my kid gets in to a top music school, the conversation about whether to go will have NOTHING to do with whether they'll be viable outside of the music world.