Why studying art is harder than med school.

This is my first time writing a story on Medium, so allow me to introduce myself. My name is Lars, 28 years old, and I’m currently in my 4th year of med school in Amsterdam. I’m originally from The Netherlands, but I lived in the United States for five years. I moved to Boston to study drums at the prestigious Berklee College of Music when I was 19 years old. Two and a half years later, I got the chance to move to Los Angeles; a city known for its opportunities to go on tour with some of the most popular artists. Working in Los Angeles as a drummer wasn’t easy though. In fact, it was by far the most challenging time of my life, especially in the beginning. Like most, I was hustling each and every day, struggling to find my place and not being able to find work for almost six months (my US visa only allowed me to work as a musician, so I wasn’t able to get a side job). After a year and a half of living in LA, I got this gut-wrenching feeling that I wasn’t going to be happy working in this industry for the rest of my life. I decided I had to figure out what else I could do. I felt a little lost; since I was seven years old, my only goal in life was to become a better drummer and tour around the world. But after signing up as an Emergency Department volunteer at a hospital in LA, I quickly came to realize that I could actually see myself do something like this. A year later, after putting in 160 hours of volunteering, shadowing multiple doctors and teaching myself the principles of biology and physics, I applied for med school and got in.

Every time someone asks me what I do, and tell them that I’m studying to become a doctor, I get a reaction that I generally didn’t get while I was studying music. “Wow, that’s so great! It must be really tough, right?” Well… yes and no. Sure, you need to learn a lot of information all at once, yes you have to put in the hours in order to retain everything you learn and to top it all off you need to be born with the ability to learn fast. However, these principles are very similar when you go to a music (or any type of art) school. You need to practice hours a day to get better at your instrument, you have to play with people in order to retain the ability to react quickly to what’s happening on stage, and you need to be born with talent to maintain the beat and hear what notes are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. So, you could argue that med school and music school are pretty much the same at this point. However, there are a few more aspects to music school I find much more challenging.

First, you have to define your own path right from the start. And let me tell you, that’s a hard thing to do. What do you bring to the table as a musician? Why would a musical director pick you to play drums instead of someone else? What makes you different? From the very first day, I was told I should connect with as many music students as I could, because let’s face it, you never know who will end up where. Connections in the music industry is basically what gets you hired, so you just have to take this very seriously. Trying to constantly expand your network is pretty mentally draining too. Playing shows, connecting with people and practicing are the only things that count in music school. You do auditions on a regular basis, get a ton of rejections, always need to be on your A-game and practice never really stops (nope, that’s weekends and vacation breaks too). After graduating, you can call yourself a musician that went to music school, but that’s really it. No one is going to ask you on an audition if you have the papers to prove that you’re in fact a musician. On the contrary, in med school I just do what needs to be done; I take a lot of tests over the course of six years, chill during vacations and most weekends, hang out with friends, connect with people I really want to connect with, and boom, I can call myself a doctor at the end of the ride.

Secondly, in music school you’re constantly surrounded by people who are better than you. This is due to the fact that everyone has been honing their craft from when they were young. It’s also very easy to get a feeling of missing out on opportunities (man, I wished I played at that jam last night so he/she considered me to be a part of his/her showcase). You need to have a solid state of mind, and something that you have to learn is to truly believe that you have what it takes. That you will get there at some point. For someone in his/her early twenties that still needs to figure out who they are, that’s not an easy thing to do. In med school you just start off at the same point as everybody else. Barely anyone has an extensive amount of knowledge about medicine at all. Sure, some people might know a little more than others, but the difference is minimal. People do get better grades than others, but it really feels different for some reason. I guess it’s because of the simple fact that you don’t have to put up with it every day. At Berklee for instance, you would always see talented people practicing and playing at jam sessions or showcases.

Lastly, when you finish music school your job security as a performing musician is pretty bad and your starting salary is basically $0. “You want to perform at our bar with your band? Sure! We’ll pay $200 for the entire band (if you’re lucky) and you’ll get the drinks for free of course. Enjoy the night, guys!” Unfortunately, drinks don’t pay rent, and splitting $200 between four band members is not ideal either. Here’s another one that’s frequently overlooked: it REALLY matters if you’re good at your craft. If you don’t offer quality, you will not get hired. Period. On the contrary, fresh out of med school you earn somewhere between $3000- $4000/month in The Netherlands (and way more in the US of course, but that’s beside the point). This salary will get you a good lifestyle pretty much right away. It doesn’t matter if you got good or bad grades during med school; you just have a piece of paper that says you can work in a hospital and care for patients. Yes, sometimes you have to make long hours in the hospital but hey, what about musicians that practice and go to rehearsals during the day and then do shows at night? Oh, and when they are on tour, they will not be home for weeks to months on end.

I appreciate people going to art school more than ever before. It simply takes guts, a strong belief in your own abilities, and a drive to push the limits of what you think is possible. So, the next time you hear someone tell you ‘I go to art school’, please consider the extraordinary amount of effort that goes into this. Because in my humble opinion, it’s just one of the hardest things to study properly.

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