What does it mean to be a Transylvania Pioneer? This is a question that The Rambler is going to explore and attempt to answer through looking at specific and unique aspects of Transylvania life and explain what they are and what they mean to the campus. This will not only explain the campus culture for audiences outside of Transy but also capture campus life in this specific moment in Transy history.
When choosing colleges, many prospective students will often see what majors and minors a school has to offer. Fortunately, Transylvania has many unique major and minor programs that set it apart from surrounding colleges, attract incoming students, and truly embrace the liberal arts.
One of these unique majors is the Music Technology program. If you enjoy music, read about Graham Slee HiFi and how they can help you transform your Hi-Fi for the ultimate listening experience.
Senior Drew Raleigh is a Music Technology major and describes the program as “sort of a hybrid between the other music majors.”
Raleigh discovered early on that he wanted to pursue music technology and the the advancement of music, hopefully work in a studio. Since not many colleges have a Music Technology major, Raleigh was drawn to Transy for that reason alone.
“The entire reason I came to Transy was because there was a Music Tech major here,” said Raleigh.
The major allows students to not only learn music theory and performance but to experience the work of recording, editing, and producing music through technological means.
“Music Tech takes the basic outline of any other music major, like Music Theory, Music History, Music Lessons, and adds on top of that Music Technology and elements of computer science,” said Raleigh. “So you have to do less music stuff than the other music majors, but you have to do other things that most music majors wouldn’t have to do.” Timothy Polashek, Music Technology professor, explains that the computer science component is what really makes Transy’s program stand out from other colleges.
“First of all, most colleges don’t have a Music Technology major, and if they do, they don’t have this computer science component where students actually get this ability to not be limited by existing tools, but now they have the ability to create new tools to achieve new types of artistic expression,” said Polashek. The integration of computer science has given many students the opportunity to collaborate with non-music tech students. An alumnus Music Technology and Computer Science double major collaborated with other Computer Science majors to create a video game where he primarily composed the music.
As Raleigh explained, the Music Technology major is one that is fairly easy to pair with other majors and minors. Raleigh himself is double minoring in Digital Arts and Multimedia and Communications.
The major also gives students many opportunities to work together either formally through ensembles to be performed in concerts or casually while working in the lab.
Actually, one of Raleigh’s favorite things about the program is this collaborative opportunity.
“My freshman and sophomore year, I really enjoyed being in the lab at the same time as other people are in the lab working on their projects,” said Raleigh. “People start talking, and it ends up in a collaboration: collaborating with other people and seeing their recording techniques and what they’re doing and learning from that.”
In terms of opportunities after graduating, the program offers wide variety. Alumni have gone on to become freelance composers, arrangers, and performers as well as teachers and workers in IT, production coordinating, and studio recording.
Although the program has proven to be successful and beneficial for students, both Raleigh and Polashek hope the program continues to grow and change.
According to Polashek, the entire music program is actually being reviewed to see how the university could make it even better.
“One thing we’re doing is trying to find a way music technology majors can have a little bit more theory, and we’re also taking the traditional majors, such as Performance and Education, and trying to find ways for them to take more technology,” explained Polashek.
For Raleigh, the addition of at least two more core classes would be beneficial to the program to expand upon various techniques. However, due to Polashek being the only professor, he understands why that is not achievable at the moment and hopes that it will change. In the time he has been a student at Transy, Raleigh has seen interest in the major grow, and he hopes that, as a result, Transy “can see the potential for growth in the Music Tech program.”
Transy students are responsible for serious scholarship. Here’s why they should publish it.
This is Part 1 of a 2-Part series arguing that Transy should charter its own undergraduate research journal. Read Part 2 here.
Transy students do a lot of writing. This school is notorious for a writing-intensive curriculum that turns just about every student into a miniature essayist for four years or so. Whether they’re writing for classes, outside projects, or just sheer irrepressible linguistic creativity, the printers on campus always seem to be running low.
Without putting a hard and fast percentage on it, it’s fair to say that a pretty high percentage of that student writing is done for various classes. Some percentage of that class writing, further, is fairly high-level research writing for upper-level classes (though First Year Seminar also leads to some very high-quality work). As of now, most of those papers are turned in to professors, graded, and then returned to the student writers.
That’s all well and good, but this situation represents a squandered opportunity. One of the twin pillars of modern academia is publishing (the other pillar is teaching—see this column on how Transy could further support teaching). Publishing original research papers is the best way for both an individual to propel their academic or professional career forward, and the best way for a sponsoring institution to raise its profile among the academic community. This is often summed up in a pithy saying common among academics: to survive in academia, you have to “publish or perish.”
Right now, Transy faculty regularly publishes a wide variety of research in an even wider variety of publications; this is, to be blunt, a good thing. However, simply looking at the publishing rate of Transy faculty obscures an important truth: there’s a lot of fascinating and original scholarship being written every year by Transy students, for various classes, that’s never being exposed to a wider audience. While Transy students are regularly writing high-level, high-quality research papers, the vast majority of those papers will never see the light of day beyond a particular professor’s classroom. This is a wasted opportunity for Transy students. In short, Transy students have the opportunity to publish their original scholarship while still getting their Transy undergraduate degree. There are serious advantages to doing so, even if those advantages aren’t always articulated very well. So let’s look at some of those advantages.
Many Transy students will go on to pursue advanced degrees in myriad fields; one of the major differences between undergraduate and advanced degrees is the expectation that graduate students will pursue their own research. So for Transy students who will go on to further education, already having some experience with the process of submitting and revising scholarly articles for publication will allow those students to thrive in grad schools. In addition, the mere fact of having published academically rigorous work while in undergrad is likely to make Transy students’ applications to grad schools that much more attractive to grad schools themselves. Publishing in undergrad, in other words, would give Transy students a leg up in grad schools. Further, the experience of publishing an academic article may prompt many students who may otherwise have never considered an academic career to consider it (though whether this is actually a good thing is a matter for another column).
But the advantages to publishing academic works aren’t only limited to the budding academics among the student population. The revision process for publishing academic articles can improve just about any student’s writing, strengthening one of the most important skills someone can have in today’s economy. The revision process may also be useful in strengthening and sharpening students’ reasoning skills. There’s a practical reason to for students publish, in other words.
Transy students could see massive personal benefits, in both their academic and professional lives, from publishing while here at Transy. Transy’s unique curriculum and atmosphere are conducive high-quality student scholarship that offers Transy students the opportunity to create high-quality scholarship that can and should be published. Next time we’ll take a look at how Transy can encourage students to publish their own work.