Month: June 2023

Graduated in 2016 with a major in Music Production & Engineering. Principal instrument: guitar.

Position: Software Quality Assurance (“QA”) Engineer at EBay, the large platform for online auctions and other purchases. His job involves testing the software on the front end (what the user sees). He’s on a team of 14, with three other QA engineers, ten software developers, and one product manager. Ming’s job mostly involves writing testing automation code in Javascript in order to test new features. He also sometimes goes through debugging the software with a developer.

Overview: After graduation, Ming moved to L.A. with the goal of being an audio engineer for a music label. Four months later, he was hired! First he was a runner, but in two years he had worked his way up to assistant engineer and then engineer! However, Ming started to suspect that this wasn’t the career he wanted after all. Hours were long and undependable, and he seldom saw the sun. He considered pursuing other careers, but wasn’t sure he could affored more education. Then in 2020 the pandemic hit and he was laid off. While the pandemic was terrible for many in the industry, for Ming it was a great stroke of luck! Unemployment insurance and pandemic aid added up to more than he had been earning at the studio. Ming took advantage of this opportunity to learn a new career, though he negotiated part-time employment at that studio while he was in school.

Ming took Computer Science courses at a community college and earned an associate’s degree in computer science, then in early 2022 he did a four-month program with “Codesmith“, a coding “boot camp” which had good career preparation. Ming applied to many, many jobs as he was finishing. One month after it finished, a friend who works at EBay recommended Ming and he was hired into his current position.
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You can see Ming’s LinkedIn profile here.

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Choice Quotes: “It’s the problem-solving factor of QA. The process of something being broken, finding out what’s wrong, bashing your head against the table to figure out the bug, but then you do and you see it fixed–it’s very satisfying. That said, being a web developer is still my career goal.”

“Quality Assurance is very important. Our website going down for even five minutes could mean millions of dollars lost!”

“Those first 2 years, even 5, out of college, try to say yes to a lot of things. It may not be sustainable but that way you can get a lot of experiences and figure out what you like. Once you have figured out what you like, double down on the skill sets you need to succeed in that field.”

“Referrals really help when looking for a job. They mean skpping having to talk to recruiters. Talking to the engineers directly lets you showcase what you can do even if you don’t have experience.”

“One thing that bummed me out while working in music was I couldn’t afford my own music equipment. I’ve bought more in the last 6 months than during my whole time then.”

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See the full index of successful Berklee alumni.

Graduated in 2016 with a major in Electronic Production & Design. Principal instrument: piano.

Position: Global Product Readiness Launch Manager (project manager) at Microsoft. In this remote position, Zack manages X-box new product launches. He manages onboarding of products, making sure a customer can go to microsoft.com , buy the stuff, see the relevant videos, etc. without a hitch. He regularly works with 2 other managers; site ops & web production teams, which build up materials and upload info; a category team which manages actual product coming in from manufacturer; a design department, and a product marketing group. He manages teams but is nobody’s boss. “It’s really an operations position, making sure the workflow is smooth.”

Overview: Zack liked both music and technology. He was nervous that he lacked the personality to be a professional piano player, and was equally nervous that he woudn’t be a good fit for working in a studio. After a year, he did audio editing for television and worked in an Apple store fixing computers. In 2019, after two years at the Apple store, Zack was feeling unsure about his long-term prospects, so he sent out a bunch of resumes. He landed a cool music-related job at a company that sold custom audio systems for voice mail — the person who hired him was also a Berklee grad. Then 2020 came around, the pandemic hit, and Zack was laid off.

Zack started applying to many jobs, including tech jobs. An internal recruiter from Microsoft reached out to him and he was hired into his position in the fall of 2020.
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You can see Zack’s LinkedIn profile here.

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Choice Quotes: “These products are a household name/company and worldwide–it’s cool to see the scope of these launches. I don’t game myself, so the job is less about the gaming than the impact.”

“If you want to work as a project manager, you have to detail oriented in an alpha, I’m in charge, way. If you could plan a trip for a dozen people, booking everything and making sure everyone did what they had to do, you could be a project manager.”

“The skills I learned at Berklee were people skills and the ability to talk to just about anyone just about anywhere. I may not be so lucky to have those if I hadn’t gone to Berklee. Also the technology component of the EPD degree and all the classes and knowledge from that made the day-to-day tech component easy-peasy. You’re using tech to its fullest!”

“Coming out of college I thought I’d have it more together than I did–job set up, etc. It may not work that way, but keep forging down the path. Searching for what you don’t know, taking in information. The path will illuminate.”

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See the full index of successful Berklee alumni.

“If you want to become a lawyer, it’s never too late. Every law class has a diverse age of students. There were parents, folks in their 40s looking for a new career. I’ll say this up front, though. A lot of people see lawyers on TV and think they all make a lot of money. 20 years ago that was probably the case, but now the market is saturated. More attorneys, more law students. A good salary is attainable but not guaranteed. To get a big law firm job you need to be in the top 10% of your class. Know that you probably won’t make what you think as you start out. And law school is very expensive–comparable to Berklee each year. Do a cost-benefit analysis. What do attorneys make in the market you want to practice in. Will that justify the debt you’ll take on?”

“If you don’t include a trial, a case is around 100 – 110 hours of work. If it goes to trial, you want to put in 4 days of straight prep and 3 days for the trial.

“In the first year of law school you really figure out if you want to do law or not. There’s a lot of dropouts. It’s challenging, but also very rewarding at the same time.”

“Don’t think going to music school makes you unmarketable. I think Berklee is why I got into Belmont despite a mediocre LSAT score. Berklee is a unique school. Use that to yoru advantage.

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See the full index of successful Berklee alumni.