Despite our best efforts, plans change. Sometimes everything works out for the better. Sometimes regret a missed opportunity. Sometimes you decide to make the change and sometimes you have no choice.
Write about a plan in your life that changed and how it turned out.
assignment 11
Until my senior year of high school, I wanted to be an electrical engineer. I enjoyed working with computers, did well in math and science clases, and liked the idea of inventing cool things.
One day, everything changed. I'm not sure how or why, but I decided to become a professional musician instead. During my sophomore year I had taken up the guitar again. Music was not a new hobby or skill; I had studied keyboards from three to five, guitar for several months at age five or six until I started playing soccer instead, played the violin for two years in elementary school, and sang in a volunteer boy's choir for two years after that. After a hiatus of two or three years, I picked up the guitar again.
My lessons went pretty well. Learning keyboards early on gave me a lot of training in pitch, playing by ear, and rhythm. Though I hadn't kept up on practice and didn't read music very well, the early training helped develop some natural talents. (It runs in my mother's family.)
After a few months, I was good enough to jam with a couple of friends. We started a couple of failed bands over the next couple of years. As we improved, we even played a couple of shows.
I'm still not sure what changed or why things changed during my senior year. I wasn't alone, though. Our Calculus teacher asked for a show of hands for the reason each of us took the class. One person wanted to become an engineer. Most of the rest of us took it because it was the next math class available. He scaled back his expectations accordingly, though he still pushed Bobby (the engineer-to-be) appropriately.
After I graduated, I went to a small private school to study music. (It wasn't a dedicated music school, but it had a good music program.) The first year I spent playing little shows off and on with a couple of friends. We weren't spectacular, but when your main audience is teenagers, you only have to be decent, or at least loud enough.
Toward the end of the year, having recorded one song in a real studio — which played on local radio twice — we decided to become more serious. Being scruffy college guys, we did the next obvious thing. We looked for a cute female singer.
The bass player, knew a girl planning to attend school the next year. She lived in the Portland area. I talked to her on the phone a couple of times and, during a family trip, spent a day with her. She was talented and fit in, so we set up a real official band when school started.
That was my sophomore year, full of all sorts of difficulties. We made some good music, wrote some decent songs, and played a couple of good shows. That was the only time I've really ever made money as a musician. Toward the end of that semester, though, things started to fall apart.
My roommate, the other guitarist, moved out. We'd had some friction, but he found dorm life unsatisfying and expensive. The bass player disappeared one day, leaving his bass guitar on the stage where we practiced, presumably moving to a different state to date a girl he'd met recently. I'd spent most of that semester pining after the singer's roommate, a pleasant and attractive girl who turned out to have a lot of difficulty telling the truth.
I spent some time over the semester break thinking about what had happened. When school started again, we talked about asking another unattached bass player to replace our missing friend. The other serious band on campus picked him up first. Then they picked up my ex-roommate, the other guitarist.
They made some good music and did some good shows. It hurt my feelings at the time, but I don't really begrudge them their successes — they did better than we did and probably did better than we would have.
That was almost the end of my music career, though. Halfway through my degree, I stopped pursuing the idea of being a professional musician. It happened gradually and I didn't see it then. Occasionally, I'd wander through a little music shop, talk to someone who knew someone at a label I liked. I still had a few connections to up and coming bands. It stopped being a passion, though.
Up until the day I graduated, I had no idea what to do. Having an undergraduate degree in music doesn't qualify me for many interesting jobs. It would take a graduate degree to pursue teaching. I sometimes explore the idea of studying computer-aided music analysis and generation for a graduate degree, but have yet to pursue that seriously.
A couple of friends from college, including my ex-roommate from the dorms, worked at a local technology company. It wasn't spectacular work, but it paid well and had the chance to advance in the company and they were hiring a new batch of people. I applied, passed the recruiting tests with high marks, and heard nothing. Everyone else I knew who would graduate with me had a job lined up somewhere.
The day before graduation, I called the company and said I'd forgotten when they held new employee orientation for my group. I had missed it (mostly because they hadn't called to tell me about it) and they couldn't find any record of me being in the group of hires (they blamed computer error but I think I put one over on them) but if I came in the next day I could fill out the paperwork and start training the next week.
That's how I became a techie instead of a musician. The work was interesting but not spectacular — especially when I had to deal with customers — but I moved to a different position seven months later and set the foundation for my current fulfilling and interesting work.
I'm very happy with my current work. Sometimes I wonder why it took such wild swings of plans to find it, though. Someday too I also want to record just one perfect album....