This semester I’ve been selected to be a student ambassador for Berklee, supercool!
“The Admissions Student Ambassadors give a first-hand account of what it means to be a Berklee student. Student Ambassadors represent the college and share their Berklee experiences through formal presentations and casual conversations with prospective students and families during various college events such as the Audition and Interview (A&I) days for Berklee, the High School Jazz Festival, and other events. The Admissions Student Ambassador program is an honor and volunteer program.”
So, this semester I traveled to Denver and Tempe to help Berklee with their auditions. All over the world Berklee organizes audition days so applicants don’t have travel so much and therefore have an easier application process. I think what Berklee does is quite exceptional, reaching out for the market, instead of letting the market come to them. Berklee wants to select the best people, but even more the people with the most potential, and that will fit well in an environment as Berklee.
As Roger Brown once said: “We want innovators people who are gonna be creative, not people that are just gonna recapitulate the past, we want people with deep musical aptitude and people with huge motivation. … our hope is that some Brazilian guitar player and some Chinese percussionist hook up with some Icelandic vocalist and they create something that didn’t exist before”
It was amazing to travel with three teachers and one Berklee fellow. We worked long days, auditioning and interviewing 30 people a day. It was super fun guiding the applicants to the interview and audition rooms, and telling them about Berklee and answer all the questions they have.
Luckily we did have some time in the evenings to check out the city’s we went. Denver is a very nice city, and we ate nice tex-mex food, as well as Bizon steak. In Tempe/Phoenix I went to the botanical garden that had the largest cactus collection ever and a recent exhibition from Dale Chihuly (http://www.chihuly.com).
Here some pictures 🙂
