What You Should Bring:

• A notebook per class
  
• If you have one, a LIGHT laptop (and charger)
  
• PENS (in multiple colors)
  
• PENCILS
  
• Water bottle
  
• Planner
  
• At least one add/drop form
  
• Phone (and charger)
  
• Portable battery
• SHEET MUSIC BINDER (prepped in advance as much as possible)

What you will bring if you are a mess like me:

• Whatever is still in your backpack from last semester
  
• Two half-full notebooks from last year because you have never filled a notebook with notes and you suspect you never will
  
• Two textbooks that are never needed in class
  
• Planner
  
• One pen (green)
  
• Two pencils (both running low on lead)
  
• Laptop, no charger
  
• Phone (important!)
  
• Coffee (VERY important)
  
• Water bottle (empty??)
  
• Sheet music binder (made, all translations done, but no tabs so it takes 80 years to find stuff)
  
• Misplaced enthusiasm
  

Another semester, another finals week, another week of people just. losing their minds. all over campus. What have I spied this year?

• A girl with amazing hair who was obviously still wearing her pajamas, printing something titled “shitty essay.docx,” wearing frowny-face socks beneath her sandals, which were very obviously on the wrong feet.
  
• A girl in full interview apparel, running at top speed across campus.
  
• A rabbit on a leash, being led by its presumed owner nonchalantly across campus.
  
• A girl in a hotdog costume, just chilling at the coffee shop in the student union.
  
• Another girl practicing what appeared to be her tap-dancing routine in front of the union convenience store.
  
• At least three very hungover people on their way to graduation, one with a coffee cup strung along his belt.
  
• The purest look of relief, as a friend realized his master’s recital paper, the last required thing for his degree, something he had only just begun to revise, was not in fact due in one hour, but rather in three days.
  
• Someone in a practice room running their piece just before their jury, hitting the high note, only to crack horribly. Silence followed, and then, “Well that’s not good.”
  
• (That was me.)
• A series of messages, sent between the times of 3:51 AM and 7:59 am, informing me in sequence:
  
• 3:51 am “Gabi guess what.”
• 3:51 am “Gabi I’m at the library.”
• 5:14 am  “Gabi I don’t understand my circadian rhythm.”
• 7:52 am “Wow this draft is gonna be close.”
• 7:59 am “YEET.”
• (It is my understanding that no sleep happened that night.)
• A lone, empty can of No-Z, being blown noisily down the street a block from campus, like an academic tumbleweed and a bell to herald the end times, all at once. It was on a mission to find somewhere better. I hope it succeeded.

(I have a Patreon!)

howtomusicmajor:

howtomusicmajor:

Finals are rounding the corner. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. This means that the next week or two is going to be, for a lot of people, the most stressful of the year. HOWEVER, finals themselves aren’t fatal, so you can make it through. Here’s six tips to keep your cool and win the Finals battle.

1. Don’t pull all-nighters. Sleep helps your memory solidify! There’s no point in cramming German if you don’t remember any of the vocab during the test. Get the sleep, even if it’s only two hours here and two hours there - and a full night’s sleep is best.
   
2. Highlighting doesn’t help. If you’re aiming for information retention, summarize what you were about to highlight. Write notes in the margins. Highlighters are how college students color, and are as useful for studying as crayons.
   
3. Leading a study group is best. So, study groups are great! Join them! But leading them is even better. Being the person who explains to other people how something works is the best way to get a better understanding of the thing yourself.
   
4. Prioritize! Think of the things you’re going to find most valuable in five or ten years. Would you prefer to remember a high GPA, or an extra hour of Netflix? Graduate with honors, or goof off on Tumblr? Figure out what future you would prefer to have done, and then do that thing. Same thing goes for classes - set up your future self to thank you for what current you is doing.
   
5. No, that project can’t be completed in three hours. It can’t. Start it now, because otherwise you will have a bad time later.
   
6. Take care of yourself. Sleep enough. Drink water. Remember your medications. Eat. Talk to people or counselors or your dog. Finals will pass, but there’s only one you - make sure that you’re still standing after the last exam, otherwise what’s the point?

Finals are not in fact the end of the world, I promise. You’ll get through them, and regardless of the outcome, you’ll have learned something out of it - if only that certain classes are not your forte, and others are.

Good luck!

Finals! They’re coming! Take care of yourself!

(via stereothinker)

howtomusicmajor:

Valentine’s day is on a Tuesday this year. Gross. Studying. Gross. Study your best on this holiday by using one of these study moods to match your own!

• The Bitter One: Black coffee, listening to punk rock anthems alone in a study room, reading and rewriting your notes.
  
• This is probably the most common study mood this V-Day. let’s be honest.
• The Happily Single One: Sparkling water, listening to top 40 music, reading your assigned texts in a cafe.
  
• Doing your own thing is great! So is chilling by yourself in public. Get those readings done in a nice atmosphere!
• The In-Love One: Sparkling grape juice (or champage!), listening to love songs, quizzing flashcards with your SO (or best friend!).
  
• Valentine’s Day is considered a time of togetherness. So go and study with the person you want to hang out with most! Friend-love is just as valid as romantic love.
• The Lonely One:  Hot chocolate, listening to Adele, studying flashcards on Quizlet.
  
• Sometimes if you’re lonely it’s best just to wallow in it a little. That’s okay. You do you.
• The Indifferent One: Lemon water, listening to soundtracks, writing essays wherever the heck you want.
  
• Who cares about this holiday. It’s commercialized. And writing essays is a task that waits for no one.
• The Mushy One: Mocha latte, listening to rom coms in the background, analyzing literature. 
  
• Sometimes you just need to get in the spirit, you know. Rom coms will do that for you. 
• Shit it’s already Valentine’s Day????: Studying the art of apologizing to your significant other.
  
• Oops.

It’s on a Wednesday this year. Gross.

howtomusicmajor:

New Semester Resolutions

The new year is upon us. Last semester is finally over, and grades have (hopefully) started rolling in. If you didn’t get the grades you wanted this semester, the new year is a great time to start new habits. Here are six habits to help your grades grow in 2018!

Schedule your study time. Take the time to actually create a schedule, first and foremost. Then, once you’ve got all your classes and obligations written down, add in time every day for studying and practicing. Then once semester starts, stick to it.

Make a priority list. Take all your classes, and list them in order of difficulty. This is your priority list for the next semester. Then, once a week during the semester, list your upcoming projects according to my prioritization guide. It’ll help keep you focused on what’s really important, right now.

Set up a study space. Before the semester starts, clear off your desk. Set up your supplies, your computer, your textbooks, and anything else you need in a coherent, organized way. Decorate it if you want. It will make studying much nicer, and also give you one less way to procrastinate when school gets going again.

Organize a study group. If you have a class you just know is going to be killer, send an email to the other people enrolled. Figure out when some classmates can meet up, and then do a study group once or twice a week. If having other people around helps you focus, this is a great way to get in some serious study time. Just be careful not to invite only friends - that can easily turn into a hangout as opposed to study time.

Figure out a cheaper caffeine source. Is your go-to caffeine source campus coffee shop lattes? Vending machine Monsters? Those are faaaar too expensive. Look into getting a cheap drip-brew cone if you like coffee, or buy energy drinks in bulk and bring them with you. It’s not just cheaper, it also means you have caffeine where you live!

Be realistic. No one knows you better than yourself. If you know you’re too spur-of-the-moment to stick to a study schedule, but you get enough study time in regardless, that’s okay! If you’re lucky enough to have the funds to do a latte every day, but are too rushed to make it at home, then run with it! Work with your own strengths and weaknesses to figure out a routine that works for you.

You’ve got this!

New Semester Resolutions

The new year is upon us. Last semester is finally over, and grades have (hopefully) started rolling in. If you didn’t get the grades you wanted this semester, the new year is a great time to start new habits. Here are six habits to help your grades grow in 2018!

Schedule your study time. Take the time to actually create a schedule, first and foremost. Then, once you’ve got all your classes and obligations written down, add in time every day for studying and practicing. Then once semester starts, stick to it.

Make a priority list. Take all your classes, and list them in order of difficulty. This is your priority list for the next semester. Then, once a week during the semester, list your upcoming projects according to my prioritization guide. It’ll help keep you focused on what’s really important, right now.

Set up a study space. Before the semester starts, clear off your desk. Set up your supplies, your computer, your textbooks, and anything else you need in a coherent, organized way. Decorate it if you want. It will make studying much nicer, and also give you one less way to procrastinate when school gets going again.

Organize a study group. If you have a class you just know is going to be killer, send an email to the other people enrolled. Figure out when some classmates can meet up, and then do a study group once or twice a week. If having other people around helps you focus, this is a great way to get in some serious study time. Just be careful not to invite only friends - that can easily turn into a hangout as opposed to study time.

Figure out a cheaper caffeine source. Is your go-to caffeine source campus coffee shop lattes? Vending machine Monsters? Those are faaaar too expensive. Look into getting a cheap drip-brew cone if you like coffee, or buy energy drinks in bulk and bring them with you. It’s not just cheaper, it also means you have caffeine where you live!

Be realistic. No one knows you better than yourself. If you know you’re too spur-of-the-moment to stick to a study schedule, but you get enough study time in regardless, that’s okay! If you’re lucky enough to have the funds to do a latte every day, but are too rushed to make it at home, then run with it! Work with your own strengths and weaknesses to figure out a routine that works for you.

You’ve got this!

howtomusicmajor:

• Someone calling in sick to work in order to sleep for their hour long shift.
• Someone breakdancing to a boombox blasting Christmas music on the quad.
  
• Someone crying because they got a free sandwich.
• Someone walking into the lounge at 1 am with a huge stack of books, and the determination of someone who forgot a term paper.
• Someone putting off writing their thesis because someone else needed math help and “logarithms are fun!”
• Someone taking a lighter to a notebook as soon as they left the science building.
• More than one flask being carried to class.
• Someone literally giggle evilly when given a 6-pack of beer.
• A freshman taking gen eds complaining about everyone else complaining about how hard finals are. (Note: the freshman may or may not have ever been seen again.)
  
• Someone crossing campus at a run in slippers.
• A nursing major explaining that finals are actually natural selection, and that she is the strongest and most adaptable and she was going to survive, while talking to herself.
• A different nursing major looking very forlorn because she just ran out of wine.
• Someone sleeping on a bench in the music building, with actual pillows and blankets and everything.
• Sticky notes with swearwords written on them littered around the science building.
• A group of students trying to one-up each other about how badly their juries had just gone.
  
• Someone leaving for the library at 3 am, because there was free coffee there.
• Someone flipping off the professor after being wished good luck on the final.
• The same person realizing that they have an entire lifetime of that class ahead of them, because it’s their major.
• Someone being questioned about how they wanted their funeral to look, after talking about the 8000 words they had due.
• Just, so many people sprawled on floors because it’s easier to do that than anything else. So many.
• The most genuine gratitude I’ve had directed at me possibly ever, because I gave someone a peanut butter cookie.

Finals: we’re all tired, hungry, and a little unhinged. It’s okay.

Fun game: guess how many of these were actually me.

Four Ways to be Perseverant

First seen on my Patreon!

Perseverance is probably one of the most important skills for musicians artists creative people ANYONE to have. And when I call it a skill, I mean it. It’s not a trait. There isn’t a magic switch that makes some people “more perseverant” than others. There’s simply a difference between how people rank their priorities, and how much they’re willing to do to actually make their desires a reality. A more perseverant person often is just a person that is better at figuring out what they really want, and what they’re willing to sacrifice to get there. Here’s four ways you can help develop that skill yourself.

Know your own mind. Seriously, figure out what you really want out of the future. Do you prioritize family, or your career, or your passion? If you want to be a famous musician, are you willing to sacrifice the years it will take for you to get there? Are you willing to sacrifice the stability? The free time? And so on. Every career path, every worthwhile goal, is going to have similar questions surrounding it. What are your goals worth to you? That’s the first step to figuring out whether you even want to persevere for something in the first place.

Have plan A.1, A.2, A.3… The chances of any one person getting a specific job are pretty low. Don’t set your heart on, say, specifically working for the New York Times, for example. Instead, have a couple of related options that would all be pretty great. You could work for the New York TImes, or National Geographic, or for a large publishing house. This way, you can work towards all of the simultaneously, and not be disappointed in yourself for “only” becoming head editor at HarperCollins, instead of the NYT. The point is that you succeeded in the field you love, not the specific manner in which you did it.

Have a goal for tonight. Try not to let a single day go by without doing something that will get you closer to your goals. Are you a musician? Practice. A writer? Write. Looking for a job? Send out a resume. Make it a habit. Have a policy of no “zero days.” If you have one small task you can do literally every day, then you’ll know that no matter what, you got that much closer to your goals.

Be okay with failure. It’s so easy to say, so hard to do. However, the people who eventually succeed are the people who persevered through hundreds and hundreds of failures. They are the ones who learned how to tolerate rejections and “no thank you’s,” until they finally got the “yes” that mattered.

One of the easiest ways to get better with failing is by simply doing more stuff. I apply to a TON of freelance editing gigs. For every job I get, I probably get told “no” for another two or three, and then radio silence from another ten. This SUCKED when I first started, but the more applications I send out, the less I care about the “no’s.” I know that they don’t matter. The “yes’s” are the only thing that I care about. The same tactic can work for you, too.

I know you have something that you really want to achieve. With perseverance, you can do it. You got this!

howtomusicmajor:

How to Create a Positive Environment

First seen on my Patreon!

There’s a connecting thread that runs through all of my experiences in music: it is MUCH more fun to be a part of a group that’s filled with positivity. However, a lot of musicians, instead of building each other up, tend to be a little catty about people they don’t like. I wrote about this recently, in a post about what NOT to do at rehearsals, and I’ve been noticing the difference more and more over the course of the semester. The groups that make it a point to be positive are much more fun, more professional, and more musical as a whole.

If you suspect that your program or musical organization could use a little more positivity, here’s some ways to start building it yourself!

Disengage from gossip. This is honestly the most important thing for me. I have never felt good after shit-talking a group or a person. At best I feel bad because that was a dumb, gross thing to do. At worst, I feel either smugly superior or righteously annoyed with the group or person for half an hour before feeling even WORSE because I can feel myself becoming a negative person. If people are talking negatively about an ensemble, an organization or a person, I’m making it a goal to either mention a positive aspect or change the subject. It doesn’t just help me, it cuts that negativity out of the lives of everyone within hearing range.

Make a point to give genuine compliments. I try to compliment someone someone and really mean it at least once a day. There’s science to show that staying positive improves your outlook on life as a whole. By looking around for things that you’d really like to compliment, you shift your focus to positive things. Plus, the compliments make the other person’s day brighter, too!

Always offer to help. If someone is struggling with something heavy, offer to help them move it. If they need homework help for something you’ve taken, look over their work. Just take every opportunity you can to help others, within reason. It sets a good example and helpful environments are so much more pleasant than the alternative!

Know when to be professional. Always be friendly, of course! Just remember that the quickest way to kill a supportive environment is by allowing negative people free reign. This can mean anything from ignoring people who talk over the director in ensemble to politely but firmly kicking a person out of a group. Supportive environments aren’t enabling. They don’t allow someone with a major attitude problem (or hey, a drug problem!) to continue dragging the group down. So if all else fails, politely and professionally talk with people in your immediate influence about some of their negativity. You’ll be surprised at how effective it is for making your surroundings as a whole nicer.

Music is such a great concept as a whole, the places where it is made should be equally great. Let’s help make every music institution more accepting, open, and positive. We got this!