I decided to return to school and enter a music business program. Fortunately, I’d done well my last year of high school, aced the GED, and gotten straight A’s in community college, so I had decent options, as far as schools.
But, like many choices in life, I chose wrongly, and between a music business program in Los Angeles, and a program in Nashville, Tennessee. I chose the program in Nashville, because of two factors.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent The first being that it was far less expensive, being a program at a state school.
(The program in L.A. was at a private university.) And the second factor being that it was ranked above the program in L.A., supposedly was the top music business program in the country.
While the program did have its merits, many excellent professors, many of whom had worked in the business, as well as the school having a professional quality recording studio, later I’d come to discover that it had huge drawbacks...
Outside of Nashville, it wasn’t as highly regarded as it was sold, and I suspect Aunt Becky funny business or that someone was paid off for them to receive such high rankings.
The college counselor, recruiters sold the school as internationally known and as having many amenities it didn’t have, like high speed internet in the dorms. Worst of all, they’d guaranteed internship placement, assistance with a major record label or entertainment company.
That also was a flat out lie. They did nothing but provide a list of names and numbers to call, many of which were out-of-date, and they did nothing to recommend us to a company or recommend a company to us.
(This was when the internet was fledgling and had very few review sites, simply didn’t have the plethora of info it does now, so it was harder to know what I was diving into…)
When I did later, on my own, find a record label to intern with, the school was negligent and failed to return important paperwork to the company, nearly causing me to get fired from the internship!
But the worst part of being in Tennessee wasn’t the school or incompetent administration. There are lousy, predatory, and parasitic colleges and idiot bureaucrats everywhere. Neither of those were the worst of my issues. The worst of my issues were some of the locals I had the misfortune to encounter.