It's 2:15AM and I find myself awake and contemplative...

Stress related insomnia :-/

So I've decided to go back to school, one way or another. Most people with bachelor's degrees go on to careers, or post-graduate studies, or both. I am inclining rather strongly toward the initially less lucrative, counter-cultural second bachelor's degree. Many considerations have gone into this decision and I'd like to lay them out for my own benefit.

The first vital step is examining my current degree: Bachelor of Music, Sound Recording Technology, Magna cum laude. This degree is presented as being not of the trade school, instructional sort, but rather as conceptual and theoretical. That is, in fact, exactly what it is. I did not finish the program with total understanding of the workings of a professional music recording studio, but rather with a foundation that allowed me to adapt and quickly comprehend a host of audio related concepts. This wonderful sounding truth is exactly where I find myself in trouble.

At this point in my life, I'm on the verge of regret over choosing and completing this degree. I cannot, however, bring this sentiment to its conclusion. I do not regret pursuing a recording degree. I love this art, and I am proud to have worked so hard to be a part of it. If I do regret anything about my tertiary education thus far, it is that I didn't sooner understand the state of my industry, sometimes ignoring signs about my personality or direct but sparse warnings from others.

The state of my industry is such that the barriers to being an architect or pioneer of the technology are too great for my degree to bridge. The signs about my personality were that though I love recording, I'm fundamentally not a producer, but a conceptualist. The warnings from other similarly minded people were that if they could do it all over, they would have a double major in recording and proper engineering.

Though proper engineering will forever remain a fundamental component of my industry, a trend that began decades ago, digital audio, has come to totally dominate. More and more functions that were once in the domain of mechanical and electrical engineers are now the brainchildren of computer programmers.

So I find myself craving entry into a world that is just out of reach. My solution is to take a cue from this industry trend toward bits over circuits and supplement my education with a second foundation: computer science. The end result of this huge undertaking will be that I'll be in a rather elite position of being intimate with both sides of the industry, which is the point at which I will truly find myself at home in professional audio.