It’s about starting over . com

Well, it has officially been WAY TOO LONG since I last posted! Wow, and several things have happened since my last posting.

What a silly thing to say! What kind of life would I have if nothing had happened during such a long interval of time? Well, thank G-d, good things are in the wind.

First, I want to say something about the blog carnival. It didn’t get posted on schedule this month for a couple of reasons. The main reason is that I was flooded with spam via the carnival site. Spam, brings to mind a can of an end-of-the-world substance that looks like cat food but that I would never feed to my cat. That and randomly submitted blog articles that have absolutely nothing to do with the topic of my carnival. The carnival is a very nice idea but sifting through all those submissions only to glean a few appropriate posts is not the best use of my time. So the blog carnival is off, at least for now. I’ll update the blog carnival page and then, after a few months, probably remove it.

Okay, so briefly, what has been going on over the last few months? Continue Reading »

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 »