It’s about starting over . com

This is the long awaited blog post. I’ve officially announced that I’ve been accepted to The Berklee College of Music in Boston (Hallelujah!) but the oft’ asked question is, “did they give you a scholarship?”

This year, around 7,000 budding musicians auditioned around the world to attend Berklee . Each one was considered for a scholarship that’s based solely on talent at first. Once a few are selected as being worthy, they then must prove financial need. The need is the final determining factor.

Out of the 7,000 (I hope I remember these numbers correctly), 30% were considered talented enough to be considered in the first round. That’s around 2,100 people. Out of these, 70% are weeded out in the second round. That leaves 630. This is the final selection group. I don’t remember the percentage that actually gets selected for some type of offer of talent-based scholarship, but it’s small. The top, most coveted scholarship, the Presidential Scholarship (covers all cost of attendence) is usually offered to only around 7 to 10 of the original 7,000. What’s that, 1/10th of 1%?

Oh, and BTW, the entire student body of Berklee at any given time numbers around 4,000. Yup, a LOT of people are turned away each year.

Scholarship selection process: What is talent?

So, I recently asked someone who is involved in the selection process exactly how this works. I was told that people are grouped into categories based on their main instrument. So all singers are in the vocal group, guitar players in the… well, you get it. Then, within each group, the most talented are identified. Then, the most talented from each group are compared to those from the other groups.

What is talent anyway? Continue Reading »

And now for something completely different…sort of.

Being a woman over the age of 50 who is faced with a certain predicament, and seeing as how I’m cooking up something….er…interesting…to get me out of it (which I’ll tell you about later), I thought I would Google “Women over 50″ to see if anyone is already doing what I’m cooking up. Reading what’s out there in the Internet is a great way of getting advice and it helps to spark ideas when making decisions regarding the “how” of it all. You might not be surprised at the search results, but I was.

The Internet is today’s great indicator, more so I think than any other media. Search results can give us a very good idea of what people are focusing on publicly, and certainly a very good idea of what people are talking about and what sells. Well, I guess search results can also give you an idea of how effective your search keywords are: If you get results that have nothing to do with what you’re searching for, it might be a good idea to choose different words.

Searching for women over 50

Searching for “Women over 50″ is both general and specific enough to give me a nice list of articles, blogs and sites, or so one would think. Here is a list of the suggested searches (a list of auto-completed searches that pops up when I enter the words into the Google search field–selecting one starts the search for that string of words). Continue Reading »

Are you blogging? Do you say, “hum, what should I write?” before beginning each post? Or are you one of those bloggers who feels that you know exactly what you want to say but as you’re writing, you have to ask yourself if you really want to tell it all, exactly as it is?

There comes a time in blogging where you have to ask yourself, “Exactly how much do I want to reveal here?” For sure, no one wants to put something out there in black and white that will come up later and bite them in their future.

We’re all vulnerable and we all want people to see us in a certain light. We all have secrets, and we all have things that aren’t exactly secrets but that we would just rather not reveal publicly. And we all have fears. When starting over, venturing out into the unknown, the two biggest fears are “what if I fail?” and “what if I succeed?”

The “what if I succeed” fear is something that needs the help of a professional to overcome, that is, if it’s preventing you from trying something you really want to do. Sometimes, it’s just easier to stay in the comfortable place that we’ve already settled into. But the “what if I fail?” question, which I’m guessing is a lot more common, is about losing face, about making a fool of yourself, and for me and others who want to inspire, it’s a much larger issue: If I try and fail, how can I encourage others to try? After all, it hurts big-time to fail, and sometimes you loose things or people in the process. The image of a hung head and a proverbial tucked tail come to mind.

Maybe the saying, “It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all,” is relevant here. Is it better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all? Better to have ventured and embarrassed oneself than never to have ventured at all? And is it better to have revealed the truth of our fears and losses, or better to remain…safe? Continue Reading »