Back to School!

This fall has been a major shift in my life….I started back to school at Carleton University. I am pursuing a Collaborative Masters degree in Music and Culture. I didn’t even apply until the end of June, it all came up rather organically during talks with a colleague there, but feels SO right at this point in my life. I have been looking for a new challenge for the last couple of years, after we reorganized Baobab Community, and going back to school has been on my mind for a while. I am planning on doing research in the field of Medical Ethnomusicology, specifically looking at links between drumming and health and wellbeing in teens and young adults. Being back in school has been SUCH an incredible ramp up….makes me wonder what I was doing with my time before! The interdisciplinary nature of Carleton has always attracted me…I have been teaching there since 1997 and have had the freedom and support to develop interesting and out of the box courses. The music department is situated in the School for Studies for Art and Culture and allows for a lot of cross pollination and flexibility. The faculty are so great and what a treat it is to learn from my own colleagues! This fall I am taking a cultural theory course, a research methods course and a self-directed reading course which is a literature review of a lot of the interesting current work being done in the field of music and health and wellbeing. I’m improving my writing skills, figuring out the ins and outs of online research, spending tons of time in the library thinking, and finally making friends with Power Point. Loving every minute of it so far. Trying to keep up with my other work at Baobab and MASC is challenging, but so far so good, after all, its all connected.  But now, head down, back to working on my presentation on rhythmic entrainment.