Hello, and thank you for your interest in the Music Industry program at the University of New Haven, and congratulations on being accepted into the program and the University. My name is Patrick Rivers. I'm an Assistant Professor of Music and the Coordinator of the Music Industry program. It's a pleasure to speak with you and I hope to see you in the fall.
In this short video, I'm going to introduce you to myself and to the Music Industry program and how it fits into the Department of Music and then at the university as a whole. It's my sixth year here at the University of New Haven. In these six years, I've had roughly 100 students that I've been an Academic Advisor for and have seen many of them graduate and move on to really great careers. At the same time, I've taught some really great classes and been a part of a lot of growth in our music department.
As a first-year student when you come here, you will probably take me for Intro to World Music. I'm an Anthromusicologist by training, I study music and how it interacts with people and cultures and how cultures and people interact and create music the way we hear it and sensing in the world. As such, students in that class get to learn about world cultures, but they also get a sense of how the music industry has shaped and our understanding of what music is here and abroad.
Besides that, many of the courses you probably end up taking with me are genre classes could be like in History of Rock Study of Hip Hop, Jazz, as well as other courses that I'm planning on introducing in the next couple of years. Besides that, I teach one sound recording class in Hip Hop Production, as well as I run our R&B ensemble called Groove Haven. And I've also taught several honors courses in my time here at the university and as well as we plan on doing more in the future.
The primary goal of our Music Industry program is to provide students a breadth of musical knowledge across cultures, genres, and eras, which they can take to their Business and Music Industry courses as they began to contemplate what type of musical career aspirations and industry they may have. The idea being that students should be able to understand everything about music before they get into the business of selling it. And it becomes very valuable to other companies when a student comes into a program or comes in as an applicant knowing so much about music as well as the components of the music industry.
Here at the university, the first music industry class students will take is Intro to Music Industry. It is a survey class that gives students who may know a little bit about the industry and may think they know a lot about the music industry, just getting them to understand the breadth of everything that makes up the music industry. All of our courses are taught by industry professionals who have been in the industry for at least 20 years, if not more. Everybody who teaches here has experience in most cases are still working in the music industry in some capacity.
After that course, the Intro course, the experiences of our faculty come into play. In that respective, I mean, every course that is very specific to a component music industry is taught by somebody that actually does that or has done that in the past. Students will take classes in Promotion Production and Distribution, the classes of Artist Management take a class in Venue and Concert Management, as well as Music Publishing. In each case, students will learn the specifics of all of these different components of the music industry, before they began to go out and seek their internships.
Each music industry student is required to take two internships. It is a part of the process of our degrees that we value the most because it gives-- allows students to take what they're learning in the classroom, and find ways to apply it and experiment with their knowledge. So they have an understanding about what they've learned and what it means before they graduate here in four years. Each student that does an internship has a Faculty Mentor, that Faculty Mentor helps students with their resume and cover letter prep can help them seek out an internship or help them get placed at a certain internship company. And at the same time while the student is doing an internship, the Faculty Mentor watches over them to make sure that they're not, you know, going to get coffee or shuffling papers, but actually doing things that are valuable to the company and gives them great experiences while they're there for 14 to 15 weeks.
Students who also go through the internship programs typically stay connected with those internship companies. In some cases, and become an employee once they leave there is a great opportunity and a great way to keep students engaged outside of our educational spaces. They understand that what they're learning does have real-world applications. Another way to get that real-world application is through our Music Industry Club. And the fall and spring Music Industry Club is basically responsible for putting on several shows across the campus. And as a club, they have a budget, they have different committees and committees do everything from scouting bands, from creating the live sound, from doing the promotion and marketing for each show, and also for running the budget. And each one of these and is run by a president who does all this work and oversees it and it's all student-run. These are the type of spaces that we want our students to have as they come here and not just sit in a classroom for years to get some experience where they can learn and get hands-on experience what it means to do things in the Music Industry.
One of the last opponents here on campus about our music industry program I want to bring up is our relationship with the Business School. Students in the music industry program are required to take four classes in the Business School, which is great because they get to learn things about Finance and Management and Economics. But it's also really great because it allows Music Industry students to be two courses away from having a minor or an Associate's degree. And one of our Business School's specialties, whether it's Marketing, Finance, Business Analytics, and many of our music industry students take advantage of that. In addition, our business school, through navigating to different classes in the business school students can leave here in five years with an MBA, we have a Music Industry five-year MBA program, that is, you know, very new, but also becoming very popular amongst our students who really think about wanting to be you know, in the business management side of the music industry, in some capacity and learning those skills and getting a Master's in Business Administration is something that's very important for students who really want to pursue something while waiting for their dream job in the music industry.
And to wrap it up Nashville. Every spring semester, we sent 18 students down to Nashville, a mix of Sound Recording and Music Industry students who get to live and take courses out of Blackbird Studios in Nashville. Music Industry students they get to take their Music Publishing classes there as well as a class in Music Entrepreneurship. But also they get to take internships in Music City. This could be internships at ASCAP at Sony at Concord and others-- there is a slew of internship programs that are down there for some of the biggest companies in the music industry. It is a great opportunity for some of our top-tier Music Industry students, but it's something that we push every student to want to do and be ambitious for because opportunity can really be life altering in many ways.
Once again, I want to thank you for your interest in our university and in our Music Industry program. More importantly, I want to hope you you are navigating these difficult times as well as possible. And on top of that, this difficult moment of trying to choose a university and to try to choose sort of a path towards your future aspirations. I do want you to know that we are all in this together and that if you are here in the fall it is something that we all navigate together as we consider what our world looks like after this difficult time. Again, congratulations. And I look forward to seeing you in the fall. Thank you.