Job Shadowing

My job shadowing experience was surprisingly awesome. I went to UIS to job shadow a music professor there. Our day started at 8:30 am, and I met the professor at his office. He showed me all the stuff he does to prepare for the day, which is basically to just check his email. We talked for a little bit about why I decided to job shadow a music professor, then we went to a class that he had at 9:00 am. He told me that I could bring my clarinet to play along in the class. It was pretty fun playing with his students, although they actually were not very good. A lot of his students were musicians who have not played in a while, so they were basically learning all over again. After the class we walked across the campus to a cafe to get a muffin and talk more about music education. The professor explained to me that at this particular college it is sometimes hard for him to have classes like the one that I attended because his students are at very different levels of playing ability. They do not have private lessons at UIS, and many different instruments are in the same class at the same time, so he has to make a lesson plan that will accommodate everyone. He says he has to push the less experienced musicians more to make them keep up with everyone else. One thing that I really liked about his class was that at the beginning of the class he had everyone pull a scale name from a hat, and then they had to play that scale in front of everyone and they were graded on it. I think it is important for people to know their scales, so I thought that was a good exercise.

Once we went to the cafe we talked a lot about how the man that I was job shadowing got to be where he was. He is from Louisiana, so he went to the University of Louisiana, and he received two majors: one in music and one in music education. He then went to the University of Arkansas to get his masters degree in music education. He landed a job as a high school music teacher, and one summer he applied to go to a music festival during the summer in Italy. (He is a tuba player by the way). He did not get to go that summer, but the next summer he was chosen to go. He got to go play in Italy for a whole summer which is one of the coolest things I have ever heard of. I totally want to do something like that. Then he found a flier from a world renowned tuba teacher to take a two week lesson from him for 600 euros. He decided he wanted to do that, so he got to go to Greece to study with this teacher. He then went back to the United States after becoming great friends with his music teacher. His music teacher then invited him to take lessons from him in Canada and then in England. He lived in England for a year until his music teacher decided to take a job in Japan. He then went back to the United States and got a job as the music professor at UIS.

Music professors have to have a doctorate in music, but he got this job because UIS is not really big on music I guess. He is getting his doctorate now at the University of Illinois.

After talking for awhile, he showed me the behind the scenes stuff of the UIS auditorium which is a really great auditorium. Then we went back to his office, and he showed me some music that he will be playing this summer at another music festival. He said another part of his job is to play music so that he can stay musical and help his students. He says he studies every piece of music before he plays it, and the piece that he is playing this summer is about three different piazzas in Italy, so we went of google and were able to look at each of the piazzas to see why the Italian composer wrote what he did about each one. It was pretty sweet.

From this job shadowing experience I think I would definitely consider being a music teacher. I like all the stuff that this music professor does, and I think being a regular music teacher would be great too. He gave me a lot of advice as to what to do in college and what majors would be good for what I am interested in. From this job shadowing experience I really think I have a better idea of what path I want to take in college. I definitely do want to do something with music, so this job shadowing definitely helped me to see that.