How can you reconcile great musical talent and academic strength?

Sarah came to us as a Junior from San Francisco. An extremely talented violinist, she hesitated between auditioning for a full time Music Conservatory, applying to a Bachelor of Music program or applying to a BA program with a strong music department.
Sarah was concerned about committing herself to a full-on conservatory program, since she thought that meant deciding at age 18 that she wanted to be a professional musician. Sarah’s true passion was performing and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to take all the classes that a conservatory program required, including extensive composition and music history classes.

College Match helped Sarah identify her passions outside of violin performance. In Sarah’s physiology class, she discovered that she was intrigued by the brain and how it is chemically and physically affected by music. College Match helped Sarah find an internship where she spent the summer of her junior year creating a performance video that tested special headphones which temporarily increase and then strengthen neuroplasticity in the brain. These headphones helped Sarah learn a new piece of music very quickly and efficiently. Sarah’s Youtube video got thousands of views and helped market this new neuroscience product.

During her senior year, Sarah took auditions and sent arts supplements for Bachelor’s of Music programs at Rice, UCLA, USC, Northwestern , Indiana University and Oberlin, but ultimately decided that she wanted to concentrate on only music performance and attend a research institute so she could combine her love of music and neuroscience.
Today Sarah is at Stanford where she concertmaster of the Stanford symphony and pursuing performance certificate. Sarah is majoring in Human biology neuropsychological perspectives on culture.

 

Sparks: Performance and love of classical music
Fire: Fascination with the brain and how it works
Vision: How the arts and music affect the brain
Brand: Marketing and creating performance videos for a music-neuroscience start up