Author: Kevin

Dylan Nelson

 

Listen to the interview (approx. 1 hr, 2 min.) or download it.

 

Graduated in 2014 with a major in Music Production & Engineering.  Principal instrument:  guitar.

 

Position:  Territory Manager (Sales).  Dylan works for an insurance company where he sells franchises.  He reaches out to people, typically those who work in the industry, in his geographical territory and encourages them to invest their time and money to open a franchise affiliated with this company.  There’s a base salary, but most of his pay is commission and bonus-based.

Overview:  While at Berklee, Dylan really wanted to work at a specific high-end rock studio in L.A., figuring he’d start as a runner and work his way up.  He did exactly that after graduation, getting a job there and becoming a de-facto assistant engineer after a year and a half.  However, he continued to be paid minimum wage and gradually grew to hate the long and unpredictable hours, feeling he had no life outside the studio.  One day in late 2016 Dylan was relaxing at the beach with friends and he got a call to come in right away to work with a famous rap artist and he expressed his unhappiness to his friends, who suggested that if engineering for a super-famous rap artist wasn’t making him happy, maybe he should find another career.

Dylan considered different options, and decided that sales was the best path toward what he wanted–he had family in sales and knew that it could provide excellent income.  Being from Texas and aware that it was booming economically, he searched online for sales jobs there.  Dylan found his current company and convinced them to give him a chance; he moved out there and started working at his current job in the spring of 2017.

 

Choice Quotes:  “I like the feeling of success when you finally make that sale that you’ve been working really hard at and you see it come to fruition and it’s really rewarding. A lot of the people I work with are middle-aged and have kids and it’s rewarding to help them put their life in a better position. Also the money is good–I got out of music because I wanted to be financially comfortable, buy a house, have a retirement, etc.”

“Even in the studio I was always very buttoned up and professional. There were no bad habits to unlearn.   But I was still surprised very quickly how hard/stressful sales could be. You make a lot of money in sales, but you’re working really hard. It’s a skill which you can have or not, but he equalizer is hard work.”

“When I left the studio for the job, every single person at work and all my acquaintances thought I was crazy–the looks some people gave me!  But my closest friends were like ‘Dude, do it.'”.

“At Berklee I got to interact with many different people–all the international students and those with different backgrounds. You get out of the box of your hometown and see the world through other people’s eyes, which in sales is an experience worth its weight in gold.”

“When interviewing for this job, I sold myself by saying, ‘When I was in the studio working on projects I was working with egotistical whack-jobs doing the most important project in their life. Being in a windowless small room with these people you learn a lot about relating and working with people. Selling franchises is the same thing. I’ve got to help them through this hugely important process without stepping on their toes. It’s a jump, but I want to win and I’m ready to start making some money.'”

 

 

See the full index of successful Berklee alumni.

Michael Ranieri

 

Listen to the interview (approx. 49 min.) or download it.

 

Graduated in 2010 with a major in Music Business.  Principal Instrument:  guitar.

Position:  Registered Nurse in the acute psychiatric care wing of Cooley Dickinson Hospital, a community hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts which treats many different medical conditions.  Here’s the primary contact person for 7 patients, who typically are there for less than two weeks.  He does a medical status assessment on each patient, “charts” their progress (enterins the data) and makes sure each patient is OK and takes whatever medicine is needed.  He’ll also suggest treatment options to the doctor or team.  He’s currently working part time (24 hours/week), but the pay is good.   He could work more hours if he wanted to, but has a small child at the moment.

Overview:  After finishing Berklee at the end of 2010, Michael moved home (Connecticut) after graduation, and sold guitars at Sam Ashe while teaching guitar a bit on the side.  In the fall of 2011, though a temp. agency he got a job as a substitute teacher in the public elementary schools.  Michael wanted to profession in which he helped people.  He considered getting his M.Ed. and becoming a classroom teacher, but noticed that it was hard to get a job and was scared of ending up unemployed.  Many members of his family, including his then-girlfriend (now wife) worked in medicine, and that seemed like a safe way to earn a good income, so in the fall of 2012 he started taking prerequisites to go to Nursing school.  His wife finished Optometry school and got a job in  Northamption, so they moved up there in the fall of 2013.  Paperwork issues delayed his enrollment in nursing school for a year, but he was able to spend the year working at a special ed. teacher’s assistant, experience which proved relevant to his current job.

September 2014 Michael entered the Accelerated Second Bachelors Degree in Nursing program at Elms College.   He got good grades, and graduating in the spring of 2016, got his license in July, and started looking for hospital-based jobs, sending out over 100 applications.  Finally in November, his third interview led to a job at Cooley Dickinson hospital, working the night shift in the medical/surgical unit.  Michael liked his job, but really didn’t like working nights as he rarely saw his then-pregnant wife, so when a daytime position opened up in the psychiatric wing he took it.

 

You can see Michael’s LinkedIn profile here.

 

Choice Quotes:

“As a psychiatric nurse you get to know the patients on a very deep, personal level often. They share their deepest, darkest secrets–abuse, trauma history. Often the people are readmitted.  It’s often a chronic thing, like diabetes, you’re just trying to keep the symptoms under control and help people live with it.”

“I really like the interactions with patients and my colleagues. This is huge: I get along really well with your bosses–that’s important anywhere no matter where you work. I also really like psychopharmacology, learning about the medications and how they work.”

“Those first few weeks as a nurse are hard. You learn knowledge at school,and you need it, but then you do it and you feel a lot of pressure and no school was enough preparation.”You learn to grow up and be independent very quickly!”

“You always have options–don’t feel that your Berklee degree limits what you can do. Just the name “Berklee” will help you stand out — it definitely helped me as I was applying to nursing jobs.

 

Michael as a Berklee student.  “To be a good musician you have to be disciplined–same as being a good nurse or student. It took real commitment to finish Berklee’s program, and similar commitment to do a nursing program.”

“I still practice to keep my chops up. Music is ingrained in me, but these days it’s more a hobby than anything else.”

 

 

 

 

 Michael with his son and “Santa.”  “If you want to continually learn and grow as a person, the medical field is great!  Nursing is a good career choice because you don’t have to go back to school for 8 years–you can do it as an adult learner.”

 

 

 

 

See the full index of successful Berklee alumni.

Conrad Hollomon

 

Listen to the interview (approx. 33 min.) or download it.

 

Graduated in 2008 with a major in Film Scoring.  Principal instrument:  viola.

 

Position:  Program Director (Corporate Trainer/Consultant) at Techstars, an “accelerator” which takes early-stage technology start-ups invests in them, and puts them through a 3-month training program on how to grow and be financially successful.  Conrad is on a 2-person team specializing in hardware.  He finds clients, builds the curriculum, works one-on-one with the founders and helps them network.

Overview:    After graduation Conrad got a job with Harmonix, which makes music software, as a QA (Quality Assurance) tester.  He also had done ROTC while at Berklee and went into the U.S. Army Reserves.  While doing QA he was interested in engineering, and began hanging out with the engnieers at work.  He worked at Harmonix for 6 years, though one of those was spent in Afghanistan with his army unit.  While he was doing coding informally at his job, and was promoted to senior QA tester, but he wanted to be a “real engineer” so in 2015 he started looking for jobs.    Mid-2014 a former boss at Harmonix had moved on to GSN (TV & Games) and convinced Conrad to follow along, again in a QA role but after doing so found he didn’t like the large corporate atmosphere and soon started looking for other opportunities.

Meanwhile, Conrad volunteered with Operation Code, a non-profit which helps veterans learn coding to build their civilian  careers.  He went through an accelerator as part of that, and got connected wtih the tech/startup scene in Boston, which in turn connected him to Techstars.  Conrad’s experiences working with military hardware, training people, and working in high-tech made him a great fit for an open position, and he was hired int his current job in October, 2017.  In addition to his full-time job and continued volunteering with Operation Code, Conrad is working toward getting his MBA.

 

You can see Conrad’s LinkedIn profile here.

 

Choice Quotes:  “I love being in a role where I can help others be successful. It’s endlessly creative. You see all these creative technologies. All these creative & innovative people who are trying to make it to the next level while creating something really special. Knowing I can help turn those dreams into reality is the best part of my job.”

“What the tech industry needs most in organizations are folks with empathy, who know how to communicate, who understand how to work on small teams. Everyone at Berklee does that.”

“Be flexible and iterative in your career.  Once you’ve learned what you can from something, don’t hesitate to try something else. Too many folks waste 10-20 years doing something they don’t like while what they like is a side thing–I don’t want to live that way.”

“Working with music hardware, complex software platforms, has a lot of applications that people don’t always think about.  Music is that alignment between empathy and understanding others, but there’s also an element of rigor and discipline. You’re looking at how all these pieces of music work together. That’s what good product design is about.  Improvization is important as well.  I would not be where I am at all without my Berklee degree–that was the exact degree needed for my career.”

Startups are a great place to be. You’ll be taking risks and eating ramen for a bit, but the highs and the lows are awesome.  To get into the field, look at the experiences you’ve had and figure out what your ‘superpower’ is–what people know you for. ”

 

 

See the full index of successful Berklee alumni.

Stanislas Barrault

 

Listen to the interview (approx. 1 hr, 13 min.) or download it.

 

Graduated in 2013 with a major in Music Business.  Principal instrument:  drums.

 

Position:  Data Analyst/Consultant at Ekimetrics, a consulting firm that uses very sophisticated modeling and artificial intelligence to predict future sales for large businesses.   Stanislas, working with two more senior people, develops these statistical models, checking in with the client, then puts together a large presentation.  A typical project takes about 6 months and he’ll be working on 3-6 projects at any given moment.

 

Overview:  Stanislas planned to do business, and initially came to Berklee thinking he’d study music for one year before studying business, but determined that Berklee’s Music Business program would provide adequate business education for him to be prepared for pursuing a graduate degree into a top business school.  After graduating, Stanislas did a 5-month internship in New York at MGM, then returned home in early 2014 to Paris, France and spent several months studying extremely hard for the GMAT.  Doing well, he was accepted into the Masters of Science in Managment program at ESSEC, considered the #2 business school in France.  This 3 year program involved two 6-month internships, and is a bit more robust than a standard MBA.

After graduating, Stanislas was eager to improve his hard/technical skills, and had heard great things about Ekimetrics from family and friends.  He spent several months taking MOOC courses to learn more statistics, then his brother, who worked at an affiliated company, passed in his resume while friends who worked them prepared him for interviews.  He got the job in January, 2018, despite being one of extremely few people there with a business, rather than an engineering, degree.

 

You can see Stanislas’s LinkedIn profile here.

 

Choice Quotes:   “Every day I’m out of my comfort zone and learning. I have problems to solve and find ways to solve them. It can be frustrating, but when I’m done solving it it’s very enjoyable. I’m working in a very cool environment where people are relaxed but ultra-smart. ”

“ESSEC is a highly ranked school, so when you have this on your CV you can get nearly any interview you want, though once you’re at the interview you get the same hard questions as everybody else.”

“At Berklee I was doing every day what I loved the most. It was amazing, opened me to a lot of subjects. And that focused practice on music helped me be rigorous, disciplined and able to work autonomously–all of which I have had to be both at grad school and in my job.”

“Our models have r-squared values over 99%, and p-value less than 0.01. That’s why it takes so much time to do–our models have around 100 variables and we’re checking every single variable, making sure we’re unbiased, and so forth.”

“You have to be very proactive about your future and very objective about your situation and what the job market is expecting from you.  Pay attention to the real world, and the different industries where you might work. Find your strengths, understand that often it’s not enough and you need to specialize further and differentiate yourself. Ask yourself what you’er going to do after graduation starting in your very first year at Berklee.”

 

 

See the full index of successful Berklee alumni.

Elizabeth Ricci

Listen to the interview (approx. 44 min.) or download it.

 

Graduated in 2011 with a major in Music Business.  Principal instrument:  voice.

 

Position:  Project Manager at Capitol One, a national full-service bank that also does credit cards and car loans and has roughly 50,000 employees.  Elizabeth works on the Associate Experience Team, which supporting the 9 “cafes” (where customers do their banking online) in Boston, plus a number out of state.  She helps ensure that people are happy and have what they need to do their jobs well, collecting feedback and sending that to partner teams to seek improvements where appropriate.

Overview:   Elizabeth worked at Starbucks while at Berklee.  After graduation, she wanted to stay in Boston, but felt that a music career would be nearly impossible while here, so she decided to pursue a career at Starbucks.  Through hard work and good customer service she was promoted to shift manager, then shift supervisor, then, in early 2014 store manager.  However, after some time it was clear that open positions the next level up, district manager, were extremely few and far between and she would have to look elsewhere for career growth.

In mid-2015, a friend who worked at Capital One suggested that she apply for their Cafe Ambassador position.  Elizabeth did and not the job, which involved helping customers with their online banking, as well as a substantial increase in pay.   Her second year she won their Associate of the Year award, but she was most interested in project management.  She applied internally to one position and didn’t get it, but they soon created her current team and suggested she apply for her current position, which she got in early 2018.

You can see Elizabeth’s LinkedIn profile here.

 

Choice Quotes:  “It’s all about providing people with a solution they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. I’m an escalation point. People have gone through all other options, and then they come to me, and I’m a ‘get stuff done-er.”

“I love when I can get something done quickly that people had been trying to do for months. I’m also fortunate to be able to work from home, travel. Capital One gives great benefits and I love my company and believe in the mission.”

“My position is new within the company.  With no predecessor; me and my two peers across the country are setting the precedent for what this job entails.”

“If you have any inkling of what you want to do for the rest of your life, just follow your passion–whether or not it’s music. You can accomplish anything if you put in the work and work hard.”

“When was a Berklee student I struggled hard trying to find if I was going to have a successful career if I wasn’t going to be in music. I’m glad this project exists.”

See the full index of successful Berklee alumni.

Mike Day

 

Listen to the interview (approx. 42 min.) or download it.

 

Graduated in 2010 with a major in Professional Music.  Principal instrument:  bass.

 

Position:  Account Executive (sales) at NetApp, a large data-storage company that provides online data-storage “the Cloud” services to large businesses, as well as hospitals and governments.  “Everyone carries in their pocket the data services we provided by NetApp.”  Around 25% of his time is spent on finding new clients, while the other 75% is spent on existing clients–making sure that NetApp is meeting their data storage needs and offering opportunities to upgrade their services.

 

Overview:  Graduating at the end of the summer, Mike was feeling a bit burned-out on music and wanted a break.  He moved home to Chicago, worked as a camp counselor and at a day care, plus gigged and taught music a bit on the side.  A friend’s parent had a wine distribution company which needed a merchandise person, and Mike took the job, but after a few months realized that wine wasn’t a passion and started looking for something else.  His uncle, who ironically was working at NetApp at the time, suggested he apply for a sales job at CDW, a large re-seller of technology.  That job was really tough, with lots of cold-calling and fairly low pay, but Mike worked extremely hard and stayed extra long and after 2 years was promoted to a outside sales job in Madison, Wisconsin.

After a successful year, his boss and boss’s boss moved to Dallas and took him with them, but his job started to feel more like inside sales, so Mike looked for a new opportunity and found one selling software for EMC.  Two years later a hiring manager at NetApp reached out to Mike directly and convinced him to work for NetApp.

 

You can see Mike’s LinkedIn profile here.

 

Choice Quotes:   “I dove into music age 14-22.  I see sales as another avenue to be the best I can be. There’s also a lot of autonomy–I can create my own schedule, work from home if I want.”

“Be proud of your Berklee degree–it’s one of the hardest degrees to get in America! Wear it and create a narrative around why the Berklee degree is valuable in this other industry.”

“To have a successful sales career, control the controllables. My first couple years I worked 70-100 hour weeks. That got me a reputation that allowed me to progress my career. Also sometimes you have to move out to move up. Get in early, stay late, make great friends with your boss & network. If you’re a successful musician you’ve already learned how to do this

Music is a microcosm to life. “Practice doesn’t make perfect–PERFECT practice makes perfect!   Music also teaches us to listen first–listening, it isn’t about soloing all the time. It’s learning how to support. In sales, we should be listening for 55 minutes and talking for 5.”

“I’ve never looked for a job without having one currently–you lose all leverage if you don’t have a job.”

“I plays music nearly every day for my baby son.  I hand’t realized how much of my ego & identify were tied to music. With my son my ego & identity have nothing to do with it and it’s just about fun and trying to make him smile. It’s the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had with music.”

 

 

See the full index of successful Berklee alumni.

Pamela Hrncir

 

Listen to the interview (approx. 32 min.) or download it.

 

Graduated in 2016 with a major in Professional Music.  Principal instrument:  voice.

 

Position:  Senior Account Executive (account management) at Hazmat Media, a modest size (10-15 employee) distribution warehouse which specializes in packaging and sending out product to influential people as part of marketing campaigns, including movies makers seeking Academy Awards.  Pamela’s job is to be in touch with the customers, overseeing everything related to the order being placed, send to their warehourse, then packaged and shipped properly and followed-up on.  During the slow season she’ll also call customers to see if they need any more work done, and during the busy season she’ll sometimes help with the actual packaging.  “We all have no qualms about staying late to meet client deadlines. Nobody including the president is above stuffing envelopes.”

 

Overview:  Pamela grew up overseas, with her father in the military and stationed at U.S.  embassies.  From age 16 through college she would do administrative work at embassies–mostly helping U.S. citizens with passport issues–and found she enjoyed it.  Pamela and her boyfriend graduated Berklee at the same time and moved to L.A.    Needing to make money right away, and given her experience she figured it would be easier to quickly find an administrative job than a music one.

She signed up with a temp agency, which placed her at Hazmat, in a more junior role.  Within a few months, she was hired as a regular employee.  About 6 months after that the senior person left the company.  She started doing their job and, one successful busy season later, was officially promoted to her position and given a good raise.

 

You can see Pamela’s LinkedIn profile here.

 

Choice Quotes:  “”I really enjoy the client relations. I enjoy doing my job well and making the client happy and making sure everything runs smoothly. I like being part of the machine that makes these product launches and award-winning films possible.”

“I still look at Berklee fondly and learned a lot while there. You don’t have to do something in music. If you have other qualifications, your Berklee background shouldn’t hold you back. Follow what you think is right and don’t be afraid to try new things.”

“The course load was a lot larger at Berklee than most schools, and that got me good at multitasking in a high-intensity environment–including the busy season at my job when there are a million expectations.”

“Temp agencies are your friend. They’re the middleman between what you already know how to do . I’ve known many people who have had success using temp agencies, esp. if you don’t have any direct connections.”

 

 

See the full index of successful Berklee alumni.

Ally Duncan

 

Listen to the interview or download it.

 

Graduated in 2011 from the Boston Conservatory with a major in Musical Theater.

 

Position:  Account Executive (sales & account management) at CoxReps, part of the Cox Media Group.  Coxreps is the “middle-man” between TV stations which sell space for commercials and the buyers (generally ad agencies working for clients) who seek to place these ads on TV.  As an account executive paid a combination of base salary and commission, Ally negotiates the package of what gets aired when and for what price, but roughly half of her job is making sure that everything happens as planned for devising mutually-acceptable work-arounds when things don’t (for example, if breaking news preempts a scheduled ad).

 

Overview:  After she graduted in May of 2011, Ally wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, except that she didn’t want to live in New York.  Her parents, who were in Atlanta, encouraged to move there, and her father, who had been working in media sales for many years, put in the word with a business associate which led to her getting a job with her current employer as sales assistant–mostly data entry, which she did while doing the occasional theater contract (“8-10 week gig”) on the side, seeing the job as a temporary way to make money.  She did that for roughly 2.5 years until, felling a bit burned out and with the opportunity to doing a prestigious contract happening during the day, she quite her job and “Did the starving artist thing” for a year and a half.  It started well, but the contract became more sporadic and lower-paying than the initial ones, and she was running out of money.

Finally, deciding that she’d rather be financially comfortable, Ally called Coxreps and asked for her old job back, but made it clear that to her this was no longer a temporary way to make money but the first step in her career path.  She got the job back and after 8 months an Account Executive position opened up.  Ally applied and had to compete vs. internal and external candidates, but she put a lot of effort into her application/presentation and got her current position in July, 2016.

 

You can see Ally’s LinkedIn profile here.

 

Choice Quotes:   “I’ve always been interested in sales. I’m pretty extroverted. Sales lends itself well to people people–people who like to talk on the phone, take people out to lunch, entertain. That’s a fun part of my job to me.”

“Any person who goes into sales will find a theater degree incredibly useful experience–a lot of your job is acting. When entertaining people (dinners or on the phone) you have to adapt & change and be a different person with everyone.”

“In the perfect wold everything would go smoothly and we’d be done. Unfortunately, often there’s breaking news coverage or an overtime sports game that preempts our programming. When that happens, we have to facilitate make-up spots. Other times a show gets cancelled or a special is airing and we have to figure out how to make our buy still work. Half my job is negotiating the buys, the other half is facilitating them and keeping everyone happy.”

 

Ally in costume, from a musical production of Sweeney Todd.  “The great thing about having a full-time job and having a livable salary is I can pick and choose the passion projects I want to work on instead of having to just take every contract because I need the money.”

 

 

Ally with coworkers.  “I love the company I work for, which is really good to its employees, and really like the team I’m on so even on the bad days I have really strong support.”

 

 

 

 

 

Ally with friends.  “Be true to yourself. I had all these ideas about who I thought I was supposed to be based on my degree and the expectations that go with that, but my 1.5 years as a starving artist made me want to be true to who I was and go have a career. Don’t be ashamed to be who you are; and know & own what you want.

 

 

 

See the full index of successful Berklee/BoCo alumni

Chris Carlson

 

Listen to the interview (approx. 1 hr, 2 min.) or download it.

 

Graduated in 2009 with a major in Professional Music.  Principal instrument:  drums.

 

Position:  Contract Web Developer at Microsoft  (Official title:  Software Engineer 2).  Officially he is an employee of Robert Half Technology, a tech staffing agency that places developers where needed, but for over a year he has been working at the same position at Microsoft, helping with the website related to their Azure product — Microsoft’s cloud platform.  His position used the Kanban Model, meaning he and the other developers on his team work on many small items.

 

Overview:   After graduation Chris moved home to Seattle, and started teaching drums at a drumming school for money while gigging a lot with many different bands and genres, and continued to do this until 2015 (with two years in the middle spent in Nashville working at Guitar Center and gigging).  By 2015, Chris started to question whether he truly wanted to keep doing the same thing “I didn’t want to be playing $150 gigs when I was 50.” and saw a musician friend of his go to a coding “boot camp” and get a good job, so he figured he’d explore coding.  While still teaching drums and gigging, his his spare time Chris taught himself to code, started with free tutorials at Codecademy and soon started taking more advanced tutorials as the still-cheap Code School (a.k.a. Pluralsight).  After a few months of this, Chris felt ready to do the boot camp.  He stopped teaching, almost stopped gigging, and did the intensive 12-week web development program at General Assembly.

Graduating at the end of 2015, it took Chris 5 months to find a job–not unusual for someone with no technical background, but eventually a recruiter hooked him up with a job at a small web development firm, where he worked for about 8 months before getting laid off.  However, “Now that I had experience, the second job search was so much easier!” Within two months he had two job offers, and took his current position.

 

You can see Chris’s LinkedIn profile here.

 

Choice Quotes:  “”I really enjoy coding. There are a lot of similarities to playing an instrument. It’s very challenging and technical, but also very creative and there are people who make beautiful works of art with their code.”

“I’m lucky to have a good work-life balance and I still gig once or twice a week. I have some really good relationships with local musicians, some of whom I’ve played with since 2010.”

“You also have to prepare yourself for technical interviews because they’ll ask you how to solve these coding problems on a white board. I memorized certain coding algorithms which are popular, and bought a little whiteboard to practice on my own.”

“At Berklee you’re with people from all over the world and different cultures and you learn to work together in a positive way with such different people.  Coding is exactly like that — you get that team mentality that we’re in this together and everyone’s trying to give their best.”

I had a very set mindset on what my life would look like and never thought I’d end up as a developer at Microsoft! But what helped me along the way was being open to new possibilities.  I didn’t worry that something would get in the way of my drumming. I just initially thought I liked coding and I’d go with it and see what happens.

 

 

See the full index of successful Berklee alumni.