Another Year Closer
After having wrapped up my penultimate year here at Kansas State University, I would like to share with you the experiences I’ve had over this strange but exciting past year. For the next few weeks, I will going in depth into my journey throughout the school year and maybe this will provide some helpful advice or inspiration to someone reading. Let’s start off with a short overview of events.
Starting off, I want to say that I knew going into this year that it was going to be vastly different. I was going to be a senior and finally getting into those higher level music education courses, I was going to be a part of leadership in the KSUMB and had a ton of awesome opportunities awaiting me throughout the year. Being on a five year plan in college does make things a little weird though and I knew that this last Fall semester would be the last one with a lot of my closest friends as they prepared to student teach in the Spring and then graduate and move on. This mixed bag of feelings heading into the year really challenged me to try and not take anything for granted and work hard to set myself up for the future that keeps getting closer and closer.
I managed to get a music education podcast up and running (Highly recommend by the way; Not Your Forte Podcast), I will definitely go more in depth on that and what that has been like. I’ve gotten to perform high levels of music with both the KSU Wind Ensemble and the Symphony Orchestra as well as learn a ton from Dr. Tracz and Dr. Dirks throughout my time sitting in those ensembles. I’ve been elected to be president of KSU’s chapter of Phi Mu Alpha and have taken time to get more involved with my church home.
The Spring Semester brought its own unique mix of great opportunities and unfinished business. While the in person portion of the semester was cut far too short by the pandemic, I was able to conduct university band (which was both terrifying and exciting at the same time), perform more great music, and make a ton of new friends both at KSU and across the country. While COVID-19 wrecked a ton of my plans throughout the rest of the semester and even into the summer, I was enlightened to see the good to come out of it, both in my personal life and in the lives of many. While I am uncertain of what the future holds right now, I am hopeful that we can bring about positive change throughout the world by just being a bit kinder and working diligently on staying connected.
I hope that you will continue to read as I go more in depth into my experiences throughout the semester. Not only do I hope that this will help you out (every once in a while I say something pretty smart), I know this will allow me to fully reflect on myself and continue to grow into the best educator and best person I can be.
See you all soon!