[MUSIC]
Hi, my name is Rob Lagueux, I'm the Dean
of graduate studies here at Berklee College of Music,
and I'm the author of this course about music, business, research
methods, and writing a proposal for a culminating experience.
I got my PhD in music history from Yale University.
I've been working with graduate students and
graduate education for the past couple of decades.
I'm really happy to have the opportunity to talk about how to craft
a piece of work that exemplifies the things that you've learned as a graduate student.
This is the first of three courses that will
ultimately end with you completing a culminating experience.
A culminating experience really has two major goals.
The first is that it serves as a piece of evidence showing that you've
acquired the skills or enhanced skills that you've already had,
that are characteristic of advanced education,
the education that leads to a graduate degree.
The second thing a culminating experience does,
is it contributes to an ongoing dialogue,
that might be a scholarly dialogue,
a creative dialogue, a business dialogue.
But what it means is that what you've done comes from
something that others have written or created before you,
but will also serve as the foundation for
someone after you to build on what you've created.
So we're going to do two big things in this course.
The first is to acquire set of skills that you
need in your life as a music business researcher,
as a music business practitioner,
or in fact, whatever you might be doing later in your life.
So we'll think about skills like how to conduct research,
how to craft a research question,
how to craft a research question that's feasible,
that is within the scope of what you can complete.
We'll talk about the kinds of methods, the kinds of techniques,
the kinds of approaches you need in order to conduct research effectively.
So we'll talk about, quantitative research,
that is research that uses numbers.
We'll talk about qualitative research,
which is the research that isn't numbers.
So things like people's opinions,
people's insights, people's experiences,
and we'll think about how to make sense of all that data to
craft a narrative that makes sense and tells us something important about the world.
The other thing we'll do is talk about the culminating experience proposal itself.
Now, the proposal is a genre of its own and it has its own conventions.
So we'll spend some time in this course thinking about how to meet those conventions.
Some of those might seem smaller, mundane,
like how to format citations for the works you've cited, but in fact,
this detail is what exemplifies work at this level,
and shows that you are already part of the scholarly artistic or professional community.
Throughout this course, there will be
four main sources of information and insight for you.
The first is your own, your own experience
that you bring to the material that we're learning about.
The second is that of your classmates,
because your classmates will be grappling with
the same material in their own particular contexts.
That dialogue among all of you
will bring to light some insights,
and information, and wisdom that wouldn't have been there before.
You'll also have your course facilitator who will help guide you through
this material and help you make sense of it for your own particular context.
You'll also start the process of choosing your advisor,
someone who might be part of Berklee,
but who might be outside Berklee.
Who will help guide you with the specifics of
your particular culminating experience project.
By the end of this course, you should have a compelling plan for carrying out
a culminating experience project that's relevant to your own interests.
You'll be especially successful in this course if you have a natural curiosity,
if you like learning more about the world,
and more about different ways of learning more about the world.
It'll also be helpful if you have an attention to detail.
If you like really diving into the specifics of numbers and words,
and the way that all of these details are put together to form a larger whole.
You're also going to encounter some techniques, some approaches,
some ideas that might be surprising, new or difficult to you.
So a certain comfort with discomfort will be really useful to you too,
because some of these things are going to stretch
you and might feel a little bit odd at first.
Ultimately though, I hope that there'll be something that you
can use in your professional lives and beyond.
[MUSIC]