{ Write More Music! }

(Editor’s Note: This is the method that I used to figure out where to go to graduate school, it is by no means the only way to go about it. If you have different ideas, let us know!)

When I first started college, I knew I wanted to do something with music, but had the same challenge that many music majors have had over the years: How do you combine an abstract major like music with a “marketable skill” like business, teaching, music therapy, and those fields. So I chose music education, until I realized that my real love was music composition, which made me realize two things; for one, I would probably like to teach at the college level, and two, I would likely need a doctorate to do it. So at the beginning of my sophomore year, I decided I needed to think about graduate school.

Looking for a graduate program is much different than looking for an undergraduate program. During my sophomore and junior years of high school I began getting mail from colleges all over the country until I was receiving brochures from over 100 different schools. This was certainly not the case with my search for graduate programs. The biggest difference is that I had to initiate contact. This isn’t to say that graduate schools and the people that run them are unfriendly, in fact the opposite seems to be true. The next biggest difference is that most graduate schools do everything online anymore, instead of mailing out information packets.

I began really researching graduate programs in September of 2007, during my junior year at Drury. Even though I requested information from grad schools all over the country, my search was based on certain criteria and assumptions. Here’s how I based my search:

1) I will probably get each of my degrees from different schools, so I have diverse base of teachers. (That said, I may get my next two degrees from the same school, I may not. We’ll see.)

2) Private schools that offer doctoral, masters, and bachelor degree programs usually divide their money in the order of 1) doctorate, 2) undergrad, and 3) master’s. Schools that offer a bachelor’s and master’s tend to give out money in the order of 1) master’s and 2) bachelor’s. Since I was planning on different schools for different degrees, I would be looking at private schools that offer a master’s but no doctorate. (This is advice I was given, I’m not sure if it’s true, but it seemed like good advice.)

3) I would also be looking at large public schools that offer all three degrees, because the funding opportunities seemed to be more uniform.

A) I wanted to stay at least somewhat close to home (I’m from southeast Missouri, I went to college in southwest Missouri). I decided that I probably wanted to stay somewhere in the midwest area. (I ended up applying to schools between Winston-Salem, Denver, Chicago, and Waco.)

B) I wanted to look for a larger school with an established school of music. I had done the entire “small, private liberal arts school” thing, and I was looking for something bigger, with more resources, and more people. I was especially looking for schools with a school of music in the 300-400 student range.

C) Something I had not thought of, but is especially important at this point is who is on the composition faculty. Listening to the music of the composers at a certain school will certainly give you an educated picture of the music you will be writing while attending that school.

D) I didn’t want to take lessons on my primary instrument, or do an audition on my applied instrument.

E) I didn’t want to have to pay out of pocket for anything (A tough demand, but as we’ll get to, not impossible).

So this is how I started my search. I knew I wanted a larger school, either private or public, somewhat close to home, that had great opportunities for funding. I began by going though the brochures of schools that had contacted me for my undergraduate, and made a list of schools that looked promising and had a master’s program. Next, I checked out the schools of members of the music faculty at Drury and asked their opinions (While Drury is a small school, and I certainly had plenty of advice from my composition teacher, I also talked with almost everyone else at some point or another.) I did quite a bit of searching on GradSchool.com’s list of music programs, and I later consulted the list of EDUers.com graduate music program rankings (a resource I didn’t find until recently.) And finally, one school I looked at because their chair of composition was a visitor at Drury for part of our NASM accreditation.

So between all the schools on that list, there should be at least 20 to 30 good schools that offer a master’s degree of some type. What comes next is requesting information from these schools (which can often be done online via some sort of form. Whether or not you receive actual physical information in the mail depends on the school), emailing prospective teachers, and the less-than-glorious job of combing through student handbooks, curricula, and websites to see how you want to spend two years of graduate study.

A note on degrees: The two basic degrees offered in music programs is the MM (Master of Music, very common) and the MA (Master of Arts, more common in liberal arts settings). I chose the more specialized MM degree. You will also see schools that offer no master’s degree, but only offer a doctorate (such as Northwestern University). It is difficult to get into a post-baccalaureate doctorate program, but I recommend it, if nothing else, for practice.

So this is a good starting point, and by far takes the longest time (It actually feels like waiting for a decision takes the longest time, this is actually false). What you’re looking for is a good base of about ten schools to which you will actually apply. So start researching!