Category Archives: Home & Family

10 days ago, my daughter Jessica submitted her college applications
to Carnegie Mellon (CMU), Oberlin, and Lawrence Univ. CMU and Oberlin had to be
in by 1 December so that they could set up vocal audition schedules in January.
Tonight, she finished and submitted her application to Smith College.
Smith is the only all-women’s school to which she is applying.

Tomorrow, Jessica plans to submit her applications to Rice Univ. and Univ. of
Rochester. That leaves only MIT, Princeton, and Brown to finish. Other than
CMU and Oberlin, the order of completion has mostly to do with how
many supplements a school requires to the Common Application, or if they
don’t use the Common Application at all. Jessica is trying not to form
opinions of a school just based on the ease of use of their web pages or
application but sometimes this is hard.

Observing to Jessica work through the applications, Lawrence Univ. seems to
have the friendliest and most supportive admissions office. MIT seems to
have the most responsive and best web pages. Oberlin required the most work
of those finished so far: she had to complete both the Common App.
and the Unified App. to apply to Oberlin and their music conservatory.

Jessica has had in-person interviews so far with MIT, Oberlin, CMU,
and Rice. She is playing email-tag with the Smith interviewer.
Several of the schools have sent her letters asking for an interview
after she had one. I can imagine that college admissions offices at this
time of year are insanely busy. Jessica wants to get everything in before
15 December because in past years a number of colleges’ admissions computers
have gone down under the end-of-year deadline load.

Jessica has gently pointed out to me that “we” are not applying to
college, she is. But it is hard not to feel that it is a family effort
what with reviewing essays for spelling and grammar, checking forms to
be sure the boxes are checked right, and paying fees for
reports, transcripts, and applications.

My daughter Jessica has settled on 9 colleges to which she will apply. In the last six months, the college list has included
as few as 6 and as many as 16 but we are done now. Really.

Two schools have music programs for which the applications were due
on 1 December. Their submission dates are early because they need time to set up the January audition schedules. So, Jessica submitted both the Common Application and the Unified Application, SAT scores, UCSC Summer transcript, photo, Advance Placement scores, recommendation letters, High School transcript, fees, plus several essay and additional question supplements for those schools first.
We had great difficulties with actual online submission mechanism because of the web sites having an real-but-unacknowledged aversion to Macs. Jessica ended up talking with tech support in the early hours before school. All of the other school applications are due at the end of this month.

Jessica spent quite a bit of Thanksgiving week preparing for and
then producing her audition CD. She met separately with both
her choir teacher and her voice teacher several times each to
develop her presentation of four songs. Her Audition 2006 songs are:

• La lontananza (Gaetano Donizetti,1797-1848) in Italian
• American Lullaby (Gladys Rich) in English
• La mi sola, Laureola (Fernando Obradors, 1897-1945) in Spanish
• Silver Dagger (American folk song) in English

Some schools want only three pieces, others specify the languages
and styles so we now have four songs ready to pick from. Of course, we
had to develop a CD label and case design. For the case, John picked a
memorable photo of Jessica from 1999 with flour blown all over her face:

In addition to being college application season, it is wrestling
season. Jessica has been on the
Harker wrestling team for four years and at varsity level for
two years. She was beyond pleased last week when Coach K asked her
to be Team Captain! She has been working with the Freshmen
team members for months. It is good to see her hard work rewarded (and
the announcement timing was excellent). Jessica was able to add
“Wrestling Team Captain” to her applications just before they went out.

Image by Katy Dickinson (Copyright 1999)

Recently, my husband John pointed out that we have not had a family photo since
we got married. We have lots of pictures of the kids and me but not of
all four of us, since John is the family photographer. We also needed
some “glamor shots” of our daughter to submit with her vocal conservatory
college applications. So, I called our wedding photogragher
Ben Janken. Here is a photo
Ben took of us in 2000:

Ben drove down from Oakland and took our family pictures last Saturday in a local
park. Jessica’s formal
head shot photos needed to be in black and white against against a plain background
so we took those in our living room. It will be fun to see our family through
another lens when the review prints come.

Image by Ben Janken. Copyright by Katy Dickinson and John Plocher (Copyright 2000)

We are still moving photos off of the camera. Here are our best pictures from
visiting the Carnegie Mellon and Oberlin music conservatories last week.

Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) has its Music, Art, and
Architecture schools in one Fine Arts building. This grand building was built in
1916 and has an odd but elegant mix of international classical images and styles.
The technology in the walls, however, is very up to date indeed.

CMU Arts Door:

Lion Carving:

Lady Carving:

Lady Carving 2:

CMU Arts Entry Hall:

Ceiling:

Stairs:

CMU Arts Sign:

Zebra Cafe:

Carnegie Quote:

Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio) has its music conservatory school in a
rambling building which looks modern on the outside and like
an intimate and comfortable high school on the inside.

Conservatory Building:

Conservatory Pond:

Conservatory Stairs:

Hallway:

Student Lockers:

Message Board:

Email Station:

Ohio Driving from CMU to Oberlin and around Ohio, we saw some lovely
autumn scenes, some funny signs, and several cabooses being used as outbuildings.

Autumn Trees:

Ohio Sky:

Ohio Sky 2:

Ohio Sky 3:

Nation’s Enemies Sign:

Caboose Building:

Images by Katy Dickinson (Copyright 2006)

Since my daughter has decided to apply to music conservatories as well as
to colleges for school next year, we are reviewing the options to be sure
that we have looked at all institutions of interest. She wants a conservatory
with a very strong vocal performance program (not just theory, or just
instrumental, or just composition) and prefers the Mid-West and East in the U.S.
As a second generation native Californian, she feels she would benefit from living
in another part of America during her college years.

Although there are at least a dozen large annually-updated guides to colleges
(Fiske Guide to Colleges, Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, The Best 361 Colleges,
etc.), we have not yet found one just for music conservatories. There are
several like Creative Colleges: A Guide for Student Actors, Artists, Dancers,
Musicians, and Writers by Elaina Loveland, which cover a variety of related
programs but do not provide in-depth, comparative, current information like Fiske.
Fiske lists conservatories but does not profile them. The list in

U.S. News & World Report just refers to the Elaina Loveland book for more
information. There is a Wikipedia entry on

Music schools in the United States but it just lists web links for the schools.

My daughter is also checking in with her High School college counsellor, her voice
teacher, and her choir director and we hope we will know what ground to cover by
checking all of those sources.