Monthly Archives: January 2018

Major Changes: How Arts Management at Miami Helped me Find My Way

By Emily Larson

According to a statistic published on the Career Services site of the University of La Verne, 50-70% of college students change majors at least once before they graduate. I never expected to be a part of that statistic.

When I entered college, I was certain that I wanted to study Music Education. I loved music and I had enjoyed tutoring younger students in music during high school. A doe-eyed college freshman, I dove headfirst into my studies. I loved studying music, one of my passions, and gaining skills to become a teacher of music.

However, in my sophomore year, I began to have major doubts (no pun intended!). I realized that while I still enjoyed what I was studying, I no longer wanted to travel the career path I was headed towards. I needed to find a different path. A different major. The decision to change majors was not easy. It took weeks to figure out what kind of path I wanted to follow for the remainder of my college career. At the end of this intense personal process, my academic advisor’s remarks to me about this decision really resonated with me: the decision to change majors is not an easy one but it is a mature one.

I came across the Arts Management and Entrepreneurship program at Miami and it piqued my interest. A program that combined my love of music and the creative arts with practical business learning opportunities? Sign me up!

I found out more information about Miami’s Arts Management and Entrepreneurship program and set up a meeting with the director of the program, Todd Stuart. We had a conversation about the major and potential career paths in the field, and we both agreed that arts management would be a great fit for me. So I dove into business courses and arts management courses.

One of the parts I love most about the Arts Management and Entrepreneurship program is its interdisciplinary nature. Both the co-major and the minor involve taking business courses through Farmer School of Business for non-FSB majors. Due to this interdisciplinary focus, I am able to blend my creative musical background with practical business concepts that prepare me for a future career leading arts organizations. Since my decision to pursue another area of study was career driven, I was delighted to find that the Arts Management program is driven with a focus on career (this facet also delighted my parents, who wanted to be sure I will be employed after college rather than becoming a starving artist).

An interesting challenge I didn’t initially expect that came up frequently when I told people I was studying Arts Management was that they weren’t quite sure what exactly it was that I was studying. In order to answer the question “what is arts management?” over time, I’ve crafted a short explanation for those not familiar with the field. My standard response is that arts management is a discipline that manages and leads creative nonprofit arts organizations using business skills and this field will prepare me for a future career working for theaters, music halls, museums, performing arts organizations, and more. Arts management perfectly blends creative arts with practical business skills.

I have found my niche in the Arts Management program. I’m studying something I love while pursuing a future career that I’m excited about.

Emily Larson is an aspiring arts manager and writer and is a student at Miami University studying Music and Arts Management.

 

The Rhythm of Management: How Arts Management Affected my Season with Rhythm X

By Lucas Conant

During my freshman year at Miami I participated in a drumline that competed in World Guard International (WGI) called Rhythm X. For the unfamiliar, WGI is a non-profit organization that hosts competitions for indoor color guard, drumline, and winds across the world. I had participated in WGI events since I was a freshman in my high school indoor drumline. Those events and the activity of indoor drumline had a big impact on me as a high schooler, so I knew I would want to stay active in this activity in college.

Rhythm X, like all independent (not part of a high school) drumlines, is a non-profit arts organization, which means that part of its income comes from donations. As a member, I participated in an organization wide effort that involved members reaching out to friends and family members for donations, along with coordinated pushes on all social media accounts surrounding “Giving Tuesday”. At the time, I took for granted that all of this work just happened around me, but now I can see the effort and the time that was put in by many people to ensure that Rhythm X had a strong donation campaign.

One unique challenge that Rhythm X faces, that most non-profits may not, is finding facilities to rehearse in every weekend. Since Rhythm X needs a rather large space to rehearse in, at the least an entire gym, it needed to make partnerships with high schools around the Indianapolis and Dayton areas in order to make sure that the members had a place to be every weekend. I didn’t think much about this when I was a member, but I see now that this issue required constant attention and effort to make sure that the transition between weekend to weekend was as smooth as possible and everybody knew where they needed to go.

Another challenge that had to be overcome because of the nature of the organization was the transporting of equipment every weekend. Rhythm X owns quite a lot of musical instruments, from marching snare drums, quads, and bass drums to glockenspiels, vibraphones, and giant 5-octave marimbas. These instruments needed to be transported from where they are stored to the place we were rehearsing every weekend, which often was many hours away. This required two semis to be driven to each location every weekend, unloaded, and then loaded back up at the end of the weekend. Personally, even trying to coordinate dinner with more than one person is hard for me, so I can’t even imagine the logistics and scheduling of making sure two semis full of expensive equipment arrive where they need to every weekend.

When I participated in Rhythm X I didn’t think at all about the amount of arts management that went on behind the scenes. I simply showed up to where I needed to be every weekend, practiced and performed with my friends, and went home. Looking back now after studying in the Arts Management program at Miami, I can see that there were a lot more gears turning behind the scenes than I thought. If any single piece had fallen out of place, it could have ruined a weekend or the whole season depending on the severity of the mistake. Luckily, the admin team at Rhythm X had no such misfortunes, and I enjoyed a stress free season performing music with my friends.